Edge Central> Graham St John

Disco Duck. Photo: Splat

It was a remarkable failure. My most impossible objective: to do the Man in a day.

Yes, that was the plan. Mounting pressures and misfortune back in the world (a new job approaching, a lost suitcase care of US Airlines and other miscellaneous matters), forced my decision to attend the week long Burning Man festival in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert for one day only.

Good thing, I thought, that my friend Seth was driving up on Wednesday night with the intention of departing by noon Friday (i.e. about 30 hours after our eventual arrival inside the festival at 4:30 AM Thursday). Seth would return to San Francisco to catch a flight to his mate's wedding. He was solid about this. I was resolute too…. but Black Rock City has ways of tampering with your default settings, disrupting connections with the outside world, exposing sound intentions to immolation.

So there we were, making the six hour drive to Nevada out of the Haight in a hired Honda Element Zipcar - me, Seth, and his Mozilla workpal Arun. These guys are smart, explorationists, driven, dedicated tech-visionaries, not uncommon credentials for citizens of Black Rock City. We each had a bike strapped on at the rear – for Black Rock City, which this year would be populated by an excess of 50,000 Burners, is a metropolis of treadlies, the principal means of transport throughout the city grid, down the promenades and across the open playa. Stopping for supplies in Reno - the Emerald City of Nevada, all grandeur and illusion - Seth and I stocked up for our day long ride through the city of marvels and its environs (Arun was staying for the duration).

We had a two hour wait in the queue upon arrival. It was nothing by comparison to the recent Boom festival in Portugal, which has become a monumental ordeal for participants some of whom endured a 30 hour wait and slow crawl to enter the world’s premier psytrance festival (more on that in a future report). Seth drove right into the left wing of the grid to our co-ordinates: the corner of G and 9:00. It was the Mootopia camp just opposite The Deep End, the popular dance camp completing their Burning Man adventure in 2008. Soon enough I vied for some sleep inside a dome belonging to the Root Society, out on the edge of the city on the corner of the Esplanade and 10:00. The dome featured a hive of comfortable Dr Seussian beds, no small hint of evolved Bohemia.

With a linked entrance, a larger 90 foot dome featured the biggest indoor dance floor on the playa with a whomping sound system, clustered climbing positions for random displays of fleshy gesticulations, and hoisted rings and harnesses for nocturnal acrobatics. The place was a circus, and you the performer.

I would find myself performing there later that night, but not before humping my pedals around the city, biting the dust on the soft, uneven desert surface, seeking shade under the Man, positioned on a tower dedicated to diversity, one of the hallmarks, we’re informed, of the American Dream, the theme of this year’s event. If there’s something that this event teaches us, it’s a tolerance for difference, a hospitality unparalleled, a meaningfulness in the desert of the surreal that manifests in the act, and indeed the art, of giving.

We seek sanctuary at Center Camp under the intense midday sun, hovering for a while at the epicentre of the Burner scene, a vast ritual-theatre with no script. There are several performance platforms around this vast arena, but the stage boundaries are fuzzy as I hitch a ride in the moving spectacle of fury crotchless riding chaps, painted nipples and pink parasols. Having rung the virgin bell at the gate entrance only a few hours before, Arun announces that he is overwhelmed by sensory data. It appears as if he’s had an empathogenic Piñata broken over him and has merged with its contents. On his maiden Burn, wearing a fur-lined Moo outfit, he is already part of the performance…. A stranger slips Baileys into my iced coffee…. It courses through my veins as we saddle up and head out.

The day is filled with encounters – with new and old friends at camp Low Expectations part of the Blue Light District occupying a choc right on The Wheel at C and 5:30-6:00.
Low Expectations

The camp could be called "The Comfortable Couch", or "Got Bacon", a lowkey affair whose hardcore geek mainstays have long assumed various volunteer roles at the event and in the Organisation. There's usually a few imbedded freakologists lurking around. I also meet Coach Ted, a man whose been Burning in absentia and finally made it home; the folks at Spock Mountain Laboratories with the scoop on “DJ Testitio”; Wonder Woman and other Mootopians; and ventured out into The Deep End...


As night falls over Black Rock City, it explodes with a collective charge unparalleled anywhere on the planet. The city ordinance to “leave no trace” and the commitment to develop responsible energy conservation strategies conflicting and other times complimenting the orgiastic desire to lay waste to one’s personal and collective resources. After all we were Burners, casted to perform in a ritual-theatre of sacrifice, sophisticated yet primal. And so, after dusk, with enough inspiration to overpower mortality, we plough through the dune-ripples racing ahead of the spice worms who would intoxicate us with sleep, or worse…. wakefulness. This was extreme partying, and we were the dosed-up denizens of deep playa.

Dismounting at the far terminus of the Esplanade at 2:00, I'd been riding the escalator all the way to the roof. But this was no smooth transit, with no predictable momentum, nor clear meaning. No certain arrival, and an even less certain departure. With its blinking mirages, fine dust white-outs, and blizzards of sensory impressions obfuscating clear directions, clarity and certitude are in short supply on the playa, a delirium that is translated into a style of music that plays havoc with predictability. Through broken polyrhythmic patterns, the festal distraction is embodied in the electro breakbeat, notorious for its derangement of repetition. Aural decay, a breakdown of structure, and an arse shifting funk.

A spectre appears out of the desert night ….. it’s me… With fellow night rider, Seth, who wears a plastic gold $ necklace, and Arun, aglow in Mootopian fur on an EL wired steed, we dismount in the open space of the Opulent Temple, an art and sound camp in its sixth year, built on the perennial shores of breakdown and release.

Opulent Temple. Photo: (evil) Stefan

It was around midmorning and Lee Coombs was coming on. Now here’s a guy who knows how to shift arse, and when it comes to finely sculpted and well-cropped playa-butt, this is not, by anyone's countenance, a standard operation. Coombs is a master of the build, accumulating all that tension, obtaining critical thresholds, until the electronic floodgates are finally opened and the playa-massive - the fleshive - is permitted to erupt with abandon. At the Opulent Temple, you know that moment has arrived as flames blast out from the DJ booth, a chamber that is part steampunk time machine and alchemist’s laboratory.

Mutate and Survive

Hours passed and it seems like I had danced across time and space … into the subjunctive realm. Near sunrise over the other side of the Man above 10:00, I stumbled into the dome of the Root Society. It was like morning assembly in the asylum, with duo 3l3tronic animating the disturbance. As the golden disc arose in the east, I made contact with the folks at the Green Gorilla Lounge, hunkering down over the raw funk cooking in their dome. It was here that I made interception with an object words can hardly translate.

It was the most audacious sound art vehicle on the playa. A mobile three level club in the shape of a yellow bath-time duck, the Disco Duck had unloaded its weird human cargo to greet the rising sun. With an auxiliary vehicle (a fur-lined double-decker bus) stocked with an arsenal of champagne, and with the morning sunlight refracting off its golden glitterball head, the duck was exposed in all of its splendour (check this flickr video illustrating how the giant duck with its green lasers for eyes and a fire-spitting mohawk, became integral to the nightworld at Burning Man).

Constructed upon an armoured amphibious assault vehicle, an instrument of warfare is reclaimed and transmuted into a pleasure machine. Although the amphibious vehicle lay hidden in its design, the vehicle is reminiscent of the reclamational work of legendary industrial-sculpture collective the Mutoid Waste Co, renowned for recruiting war machines for radical assaults on the senses. Throwing the first acid house warehouse raves in London at the old Coach Station and mutating the refuse of modern culture into the Marvelous, these salvage-situationists had been instrumental conspirators in London’s reclamational sensibility. Throughout the mid to late 1980s, and into the 1990s, the Mutoids had been busy revivifying obsolescence and transforming forgotten landscapes into objects and sites of beauty, stirring those who came to witness, and dance, with a passion to make some noise. In London and across Europe, furnishing squatted buildings with anthropomorphic engines, mutated bike parts, transmuted MIG fighter jets, and raising subterranean spaces of difference where all became a spectacle to each other, they incited fellowship and inspired the imagination.

MWCo Tankhenge framing Rieschstaag Berlin '92. Photo: Rene Menges

MWCo. Set for 'Blast Off 94', Tachelles Berlin. Photo: Rene Menges

In Australia, Robin Mutoid Cooke’s Mutonia Sculpture Park, which includes Planehenge among other pieces, constitutes an important development in this recycladelic diaspora. This is important to mention not least since last Winter Solstice, Mutonia, near Marree in outback South Australia, hosted the annual Mighty Burning Demon festival, a small gathering in which the burning of an anthropomorphic figure transpires. Sound familiar?

The MWCo were building “art cars” before the Man was first set aflame on Baker Beach in the mid 1980s. There are exceptional video compilations of early Mutoid work on Youtube. Note the “zombie beat” elicited by the Mutoid band presaging an electronic soundtrack at parties. And Robin Mutoid’s lens on the MWCo can be found in his chapter in FreeNRG.

With the prospect of nuclear armageddon shaping their artifice, the Mutoids developed a near obsession with a post-apocalyptic Mad Max aesthetic. “Mutate and Survive”—a rephrasing of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament slogan “Protest and Survive”—became the Mutoid mantra conveying dissatisfaction with conventional forms of protest which they thought ineffectual, and which would emblematize their own brand of resistance to the nuclear age.

All of this is not remote from Burning Man. For one thing, The Death Guild, with their Thunderdome arena and fleet of vehicles at least in part inspired by the Road Warrior, have long been integral to the event. The Death Guild illustrate that, out here, almost anyone can be a post-apocalyptic cult hero. For another thing, MWCo artists landed at Burning Man in force this year with their head-turning motorised animatronic fire-breathing horse and covered wagon Spaghetti West 10, and a pair of dinosaur-like mechanical beasts: the Dino-Dumper and the Clamp-O-Saurus.

Mutoid Waste Co's Spaghetti West 10. Photo: Colombian

But I digress. It was now Friday, approaching noon. Apart from a couple dozey hours on a mattress in the shade at the Deep End, I’d hardly slept. At this point the reasoning behind my departure was occulted by a looming white-out, my plans drifting rapidly out of view. Twenty-four hours in the desert and I was like Sergeant Howie, the archetype of order and organisation whose convictions made him the prime candidate for incineration in The Wickerman.

I rode downtown to camp Low Expectations to say goodbye to my friends. I arrive there and within minutes I’m drawing from a bottle of Tabu Dry. It was my friend Michael's parting gesture. Soon I’d be on the road back to California.

Just then, Jessica says, “why don’t you stay.”

"I can't."

“Why not?”

I was stumped. I couldn’t rightly recall. But then I remembered something. I didn’t have water, much food, nor a tent, blanket, supplies for another 4 days in the desert. I’d prepared for one day, as I needed to get back to the city …. for something.

“But we have more than enough water, food. Even a tent and a blanket....”

I was reclining on a tres comfortable couch in the middle of the desert glissading on absinthe, surrounded by 50,000 fellow pilgrims within a two mile radius. With each word she spoke I had fewer reasons to leave, until I was finally check-mated: “we can give you a ride back on the bus”.

What had I been thinking? Hadn’t I realised I’d get caught in this momentum, this open-ended potlatch of epic proportions, this vast canvas the significance of which lies in the relationships one forms through shared consumption in extreme conditions? Out here, in one of the most physically inhospitable landscapes in the country, transformed over a week into one of the more socially receptive environments a human can know, I was like the guy who once turned up at the entrance naked as an experiment to learn if and how he could survive. My failure to leave and his successful survival are strangely connected, if by nothing other than the compelling gift.

I would soon cycle back across the city to break the news to Seth - himself on schedule to bail at noon. "Congratulations", he smiles, handing me his remaining supplies, "you failed".


Thanks to crew at Low Expectations who made this short story odyssean. Nods to Seth and Arun and others at Mootopia. And further gratitude to Coach Ted, Lee Coombs the super-cockers and all those other-selves who Burn.

Photo: Disco Duck by Splat

It was a remarkable failure. My most impossible objective: to do the Man in a day.

Yes, that was the plan. Mounting pressures and misfortune back in the world (a new job approaching, a lost suitcase care of US Airlines and other miscellaneous matters), forced my decision to attend the week long Burning Man festival in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert for one day only.

Good thing, I thought, that my friend Seth was driving up on Wednesday night with the intention of departing by noon Friday (i.e. about 30 hours after our eventual arrival inside the festival at 4:30 AM Thursday). Seth would return to San Francisco to catch a flight to his mate's wedding. He was solid about this. I was resolute too…. but Black Rock City has ways of tampering with your default settings, disrupting connections with the outside world, exposing intention to immolation.

So there we were, making the six hour drive to Nevada out of the Haight in a hired Honda Element Zipcar - me, Seth, and his Mozilla workpal Arun. These guys are smart, explorationists, driven, dedicated tech-visionaries, not uncommon credentials for citizens of Black Rock City. We each had a bike strapped on at the rear – for Black Rock City, which this year would be populated by an excess of 50,000 Burners, is a metropolis of treadlies, the principal means of transport throughout the city grid, down the promenades and across the open playa. Stopped for supplies in Reno, the Dodge City of Nevada with all the illusory grandeur of Emerald City, Seth and I stocked up for our day long ride through the city of marvels and its environs (Arun was staying for the duration).

We had a two hour wait in the queue upon arrival. It was nothing by comparison to the recent Boom festival in Portugal, which has become a monumental ordeal for participants some of whom endured a 30 hour wait and slow crawl to enter the world’s premier psytrance festival (more on that in a future report). Seth drove right into the left wing of the grid to our co-ordinates: the corner of G and 9:00. It was the Mootopia camp just opposite The Deep End, the popular dance camp completing their Burning Man adventure in 2008. Soon enough I vied for some sleep inside a dome belonging to the Root Society, out on the edge of the city on the corner of the Esplanade and 10:00. The dome featured a hive of comfortable Dr Seussian beds, no small hint of evolved Bohemia.

With a linked entrance, a larger 90 foot dome featured the biggest indoor dance floor on the playa with a whomping sound system, clustered climbing positions for random displays of fleshy gesticulations, and hoisted rings and harnesses for nocturnal acrobatics. The place was a circus, and you were the performer.

I would find myself performing there later that night, but not before humping my pedals around the city, biting the dust on soft and uneven playa surface more than once, seeking shade under the Man, positioned on a tower dedicated to diversity, one of the hallmarks, we’re informed, of the American Dream, the theme of this year’s event. If there’s something that this event teaches us, it’s a tolerance for difference, a hospitality unparalleled, a meaningfulness in the desert of the surreal that manifests in the act, and indeed the art, of giving. I’ll try to explain this further below.

We seek sanctuary at Center Camp under the intense midday sun, hovering for a while at the epicentre of the Burner scene, a vast ritual-theatre with no script. There are several performance platforms around this vast arena, but the stage boundaries are fuzzy as I hitch a ride in the moving spectacle of fury crotchless riding chaps, tits and parasols. Having rung the virgin bell at the gate entrance only a few hours before, Arun announces that he is overwhelmed by sensory data. It appears as if he’s had an empathogenic Piñata broken over him and has merged with its contents. On his maiden Burn, wearing a fur-lined Moo outfit, he is already part of the performance…. A stranger slips Baileys into my iced coffee…. It courses through my veins as we saddle up and head out.

The day is filled with encounters – with new and old friends at camp Low Expectations part of the Blue Light District occupying a choc right on The Wheel at C and 5:30-6:00.
Low Expectations

The camp could be called "The Comfortable Couch", or "Got Bacon", a lowkey affair whose hardcore mainstays have long assumed various volunteer roles at the event and in the Organisation. There's usually a few imbedded freakologists lurking around. I also meet Coach Ted, a man whose been Burning in absentia and finally made it home; the folks at Spock Mountain Laboratories with the scoop on “DJ Testitio”; The Deep End; Wonder Woman and other Mootopians….

Deep End Photo: Third Eye Guy

As night falls over Black Rock City, it explodes with a collective charge unparalleled by any city on the planet. The city ordinance to “leave no trace” and the commitment to develop responsible energy conservation strategies conflicting and other times complimenting the orgiastic desire to lay waste to one’s personal and collective resources. After all we were Burners, casted to perform in a grand sacrifice, sophisticated yet primal. And so, after dusk, with enough inspiration to overpower mortality, we plough through the dune-ripples racing ahead of the spice worms who would intoxicate us with sleep, or worse…. wakefulness. This was extreme partying, and we were the dosed-up denizens of deep playa.

Dismounting at the far terminus of the Esplanade at 2:00, I'd been riding the escalator all the way to the roof. But this was no smooth transit, with no predictable momentum, nor absolute meaning; no certain arrival, and an even less certain departure. Clarity and certitude are in short supply at Burning Man, with its blinking mirages, fine dust white-outs, and blizzards of sensorial impressions obfuscating clear directions.

This delirium is translated into a style of music that plays havoc with predictability through broken polyrhythmic patterns, a distraction embodied in the electro breakbeat, notorious for its derangement of repetition. Aural decay, a breakdown of structure, and an arse shifting funk.

A spectre appears out of the desert night ….. it’s me… With fellow night rider, Seth, who wears an ironic gold $ necklace, and Arun, aglow in Mootopian fur on an EL wired steed, we dismount in the open space of the Opulent Temple, an art and sound camp in its sixth year and built on the perennial shores of breakdown and release.

Opulent Temple. Photo (evil) Stefan

It was around midmorning and Lee Coombs was coming on. Now here’s a guy who knows how to shift arse, and when it comes to finely sculpted and well-cropped playa-butt, this is not, by anyone's countenance, a standard operation. Coombs is a master of the build, accumulating all that tension, obtaining critical thresholds, until the electronic floodgates are finally opened and the playa-massive - the fleshive - is permitted to erupt with abandon. At the Opulent Temple, you know that moment has arrived as flames blast out from the DJ booth, a chamber that is part steampunk time machine and alchemist’s laboratory.

Mutate and Survive

Hours passed and it seems like I had danced across time and space … into the subjunctive realm. Near sunrise over the other side of the Man above 10:00, I made contact with the folks at Green Gorilla Lounge, hunkering down over the funk. It was here that I made interception with an object words can hardly translate.

A mobile three level club in the shape of a yellow bath-time duck, the most audacious sound art vehicle on the playa, the Disco Duck had unloaded its weird human cargo to greet the rising sun. With an auxiliary vehicle (a fur-lined double-decker bus) stocked with an arsenal of champagne, and with the morning sunlight refracting off its golden glitterball head, the duck was exposed in all of its splendour. Check this flickr video illustrating how the giant duck with its green lasers for eyes and a fire-spitting mohawk, became integral to the nightworld at Burning Man.

Constructed upon an armoured amphibious assault vehicle, with the Duck, a machine of war and destruction is reclaimed and transmuted into a pleasure machine. Although the amphibious vehicle lay hidden in its design, the vehicle is reminiscent of the reclamational work of legendary industrial-sculpture collective the Mutoid Waste Co, renowned for revivifying obsolescence and recruiting machines of war for radical assaults on the senses. Throwing the first acid house warehouse raves in London at the old Coach Station and mutating the refuse of modern culture into the Marvelous, these salvage-situationists had been instrumental conspirators in London’s reclamational sensibility. Throughout the mid to late 1980s, the Mutoids had been busy transforming industrial rejectamenta and forgotten landscapes into objects and sites of beauty, stirring those who came to witness, and dance, with a passion to make some noise. Furnishing squatted buildings with anthropomorphic engines, mutated bike parts, transmuted MIG fighter jets, and raising subterranean spaces of difference where all became a spectacle to each other, they incited fellowship and inspired the imagination.

MWCo Tankhenge framing Rieschstaag Berlin '92. Photo: Rene Menges

MWCo. Set for 'Blast Off 94', Tachelles Berlin. Photo: Rene Menges

MIG installation at Tachelles, Berlin

In Australia, Robin Mutoid Cooke’s Mutonia Sculpture Park, which includes Planehenge among other pieces, constitutes an important development in this recycladelic diaspora. This is important to mention not least since over last Winter Solstice (June 21, 2008), Mutonia, near Marree in outback South Australia, hosted the annual Mighty Burning Demon festival, a small gathering in which the burning of an anthropomorphic figure transpires. Sound familiar?

The MWCo were building “art cars” before the Man was first set aflame on Baker Beach in the mid 1980s. There’s awesome video compilations of early Mutoid work on Youtube. Note the “zombie beat” elicited by the Mutoid band presaging an electronic soundtrack at parties. And Robin Mutoid’s lens on the MWCo can be found in his chapter in FreeNRG.

With the prospect of nuclear Armageddon shaping their artifice, the Mutoids developed a near obsession with a post-apocalyptic Mad Max aesthetic. “Mutate and Survive”—a rephrasing of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament slogan “Protest and Survive”—became the Mutoid mantra conveying dissatisfaction with conventional forms of protest which they thought ineffectual, and which would emblematize their own brand of resistance to the nuclear age.

All of this is not remote from Burning Man. For one thing, The Death Guild, with their Thunderdome arena and fleet of vehicles inspired by the Road Warrior, have long been integral to event. The Death Guild contend that, out here, almost anyone can be a post-apocalyptic cult hero. For another, MWCo artists landed at BM in force this year with their motorised animatronic fire-breathing horse and covered wagon Spaghetti West 10, and a pair of dinosaur-like mechanical beasts: the Dino-Dumper and the Clamp-O-Saurus.
Mutoid Waste Co's Spaghetti West 10. Photo: Colombian


But I digress. It was now Friday approaching noon. Apart from a couple of dozey hours on a mattress in the shade at the Deep End, I’d hardly slept. At this point the reasoning behind my departure was occulted by a looming white-out, my plans drifting out of view. Twenty-four hours in the desert and I was like Sergeant Howie, the archetype of order and organisation whose convictions made him the prime candidate for incineration in The Wickerman.

I rode downtown to camp Low Expectations to say goodbye to my friends. I arrive there and within minutes I’m drawing from a bottle of Tabu Dry. It was Michael's parting gesture. Soon I’d be on the road back to California. Just then, Jessica says, “why don’t you stay.” I cannot, I murmur. “Why not?” I was stumped. I couldn’t rightly recall. But then I remembered something. I didn’t have any water, much food, a tent, a blanket, supplies for another 4 days in these conditions. I’d prepared for one day. I needed to get back to the city …. for something. “But we have more than enough water, food, even a tent and a blanket.” I’m prevaricating. I was reclining on a tres comfortable couch in the middle of the desert glissading on absinthe, surrounded by 50,000 fellow pilgrims within a two mile radius. With each word she spoke I had fewer reasons to leave, until I was finally check-mated: “we can give you a ride back on the bus”.

What had I been thinking? Hadn’t I realised I’d get caught in this momentum, this open-ended potlatch of epic proportions, this vast canvas the significance of which lies in the relationships one forms through shared consumption in extreme conditions? Out here, in one of the most physically inhospitable landscapes in the country, transformed over a week into one of the more socially receptive environments a human can know, I was like the guy who once turned up at the entrance naked as an experiment to learn if and how he could survive. My failure to leave and his successful survival are strangely connected.

And the gift compels the return...



Thanks to crew at Low Expectations who made this short story odyssean. Nods to Seth and Arun and others at Mootopia. And further gratitude to Coach Ted, Lee Coombs the super-cockers and all those who Burn.

I began writing this near Santa Cruz, on a decking within wifi under redwoods in the warmth of a Californian July, with my friend “Coach” Ted, a former gymnastics coach for the Virgin Islands Olympic team, keeping me in training for further legs of the odyssey.

Well, no, I began it in Jamaica where I recently spent two and half weeks jumping from one dancehall party to the next

Actually, no. It started several years ago when I'd been gathering interest in mobile initiatives committed to social and political causes in Australia called ‘sound systems’. The likes of Labrats and other vehicles for the performance of postcolonial desires had been rallying the disaffected to wild and weird frontlines, pursuing, as Pete Strong (aka Mashy P) once said, “a sound system for all”. Back then, I'd gotten excited by these proactive and convivial mobilisations. Responding to local ecological and humanitarian issues, and fed by developments in electronic music culture, a groovement was afoot.

Becoming interested in the roots of these developments, one path took me in the direction of the original spinners, the UK’s Spiral Tribe, whose anarchist antics appealed to thousands of tekno-travellers and sonic squatters, attracting the law in the form of a four month and £4 million trial in 1994 eventually seeing Spiral Tribe participants acquitted of the charge of “conspiracy to cause a public nuisance”. The Spirals then kicked off the European and worldwide freetekno movement whose chief cultural expression is the teknival.

Teknival at Marigny 2003 (systematek)

Although influenced by music and carnival traditions transferred from the Caribbean to the UK with the flows of immigrants from the 1960s, the non-Jamaican UK sound systems were generally vehicles for a different brand of “freedom” than that pursued by those with roots in the Caribbean and Africa. While Simon Jones writes about the appearance/migration of these collectively owned cultural and technological resources in the UK (from the 1960s) (1995. “Rocking the House: Sound System Cultures and the Politics of Space.” Journal of Popular Music Studies 7: 1–24), and Enda Murray does a pretty good job of capturing the transposition of JA to non-JA sound systems culture in his chapter in FreeNRG, the comparative study of the Jamaican and non-Jamaican sound systems in Europe and elsewhere is largely untouched territory and no doubt potentiating some fruitful insights on the nature of “freedoms” sought, and the variant meanings of the phrase “sound system”.

Another path, then, took me to Jamaica where I long knew lay the origins of the sound system development in Europe and around the world. Featuring the extemporaneous microphone controller or “toaster” (initially, also the “selector” or DJ), sound-reinforcement systems had been amplifying local concerns in Jamaica since the 1950s. So I quite readily jumped at the opportunity to travel to the land of rhythm offered by the Crossroads in Cultural Studies conference held at the Mona campus of the University of West Indies in Kingston in early July 2008. There in the heat and amid the fugue triggered by the sleep-interrupted nights in the thin-walled campus apartments, I organised a panel called Uncertain Vibes on tension and change within electronic dance music cultures. The panel attracted adventurous international scholars of EDMC. They were individuals seeking more from Jamaica than the cultural events laid on for conference delegates, which included a garden party reception at the Prime Minister’s residence, and the performance from JAs number one sound system Stone Love in the tightly secured grounds of the university towards the end of the conference...

Unlike most delegates who were bussed in daily from their plush hotel suites in Kingston, the panelists, along with many student delegates, occupied the cheaper gender segregated on-campus lodgings in a compound patrolled by a legion of security personnel. Walking to the conference venue out of the compound each day, I negotiated the diverse sounds drifting across campus. I recall the breeze carrying the refrain in Puff Daddy's “I’ll Be Missing You” from a distant yet remarkably audible amplification system. Mixed with cricket commentary booming from portable radios the music lifted me towards Mona Campus cultural centre. I had the distinct impression that parties were happening all around me, and a desire grew for contact, immersion and exposure beyond the campus compound.

During that week the UWI campus became a launching-pad for forays into Kingston. Prior to my arrival, Larisa Mann (aka dj Ripley), a graduate student in Law at Berkeley who’d traveled and worked in Kingston in 2007 (and kept a blog where, among other things, she offers her analysis of club dj techniques and local dance culture) gave me the contact for Andrea Lewis, artist manager and chilled operator of Beat ‘n Track Tours who, with her rasta friend Bear, trucked a small group of us out to Trenchtown to Bob Marley’s yard, the Boystown sportclub, then Lee “Scratch” Perry’s house, and downtown Kingston to the Marcus Garvey museum and nearby off Orange St, famed for its record shops, for a steamed fish feast.
Trenchtown murals

Bob Marley's Combi van at his yard in Trenchtown
Some of us (including Anna Gavanas, a dubstep dj who subsequently produced this dancehall track using a chopped up nati maaga voice sample from a 7-inch record acquired in Kingston) went on a night rider with a young gang of chaperones to a Black Prince bashment in a carpark downtown.
Kingston - en route to Black Prince with Damien and another of our guides at the Sherrif HQ

It was my first direct experience with the quality of the Jamaican sound systems. There were two walls of cabinets stacked high. Warmups included Toto’s Africa, startling to hear, and even more surprising was how good it sounded. I was broadsided by Toto, and enjoyed it. Our group of four were the only white people there, our chaperones looking after us, and us them. Drinking Red Stripe, Stones, Appleton's, and rolling spliffs, the crowd grew but no-one yet occupied the centre of the carpark. Since some of us were presenting the next day we had to leave before 1 am – ie before all the action started. A couple of nights later, others disappeared into West Kingston to a party at the Stone Love HQ and a street party operated by the Mo’ Money sound system, returning with wild reports of “daggering” and “Dutty Wine”.

The following night, our local friend Bradley, whose mother held a stall at the conference, took us out to his favourite club and then the all-night rooftop venue at Cookies across the harbour from Port Royal. There, I got a sudden education - no my friends hadn't been introduced to home grown wine, since the Dutty Wine is a dance performed by women bent at the knees, with a rapid winding of legs and neck, body L-shaped and orchestrating all that rotation from their toes like ballerina seductresses. The place was dripping with it. What struck me most was the way young women were making themselves available for ludicised rape, sometimes willingly taken and kind of pseudo-drilled by men in their cohort, or by total strangers, all smiling and thrusting hips in close quarters, animated by the most powerful bass anywhere. Indeed the bass was the penetrative agent.

Perhaps my confusion had something to do with ignorance – the song by that name had catapulted dancehall artist Tony Matterhorn into fame a couple of years back, and even Beyonce made a variation of this dance… Anyway, the athleticism wasn’t exclusive to females poom pooming their neighbours, as groups of young men would appear performing carefully rehearsed manoeuvres, like what I later learned is called the “Nuh Linga”. Wearing smooth soled shoes, they swept around the floor like well coordinated human mops. These and a host of other dances evolve and circulate widely, perfected and modified every night across the country, including the popular “Scooby Doo”, and even one intriguingly named the “Myspace”.

And all this occurred under lights and on film. Video operators stalked the venue with their lights on high beam offering everyone the opportunity to vogue their moves (projected live on screens in the venue) for the benefit of all present, and presumably along with those viewing versions circulating on DVDs around the country. The shoots were directed by the MCs whose explicit and lurid encouragements were launched throughout the night in quickfire patois – setting up romances and other tales of "pussy stabbing", from slow grinds to frenetic encounters, as when, like vulturous vixen, girls in hot shorts circle and attack their target like this guy. The entire performance seemed like a stand-off between the Microphone Controllers and the Booty Controllers.

It was a steep learning curve. I knew of dancehall through passing mediators like Steve Bedlam (Bedlam sound system) and founder of reggae roots sound Negusa Negast, "Bashment" Bish, whose collaborative rig was imported from the UK to Australia for the Earthdream convoyage in 2000. I traveled with Bish and others like Jason from New York’s Blackkat sound system to East Timor one year after the referendum, firing off embedded freak reports from the field including this piece from Dili. These guys were heavily influenced by the sound system tradition which in Kingston, goes back to the 1940s, when “sound men” began using record players, amplifiers, and rare black American records, and when the “sound system” became the principal conduit for a subversive sphere of performance rooted in slave-era country dances and percolating in lower-class black communities. Taking cues from post–WWII American R&B, and early infused with dub-reggae and Rastafarianism, what became known as “dancehall” was a distinct Jamaican style by the 1980s, attracting controversy for its association with homophobia, bling and violence.

After 2000, I poured over works like Norman Stolzoff’s Wake the Town and Tell the People: Dancehall Culture in Jamaica (Duke University Press, 2000), in which dancehall/sound system events are described as “the centre of the ghetto youth’s lifeworld—a place for enjoyment, cultural expression and creativity, and spiritual renewal.” Later I came across Carolyn Cooper’s Sound Clash: Jamaican Dancehall Culture at Large (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). Focusing on more than just the music and the DJs, Cooper conveys how dancehall is a vehicle for the lyrical and embodied articulation of what she identifies as “slackness,” constituting, she writes, a “radical, underground confrontation with the patriarchal gender ideology and duplicitous morality of fundamentalist Jamaican society.” Dancehall achieves this, Cooper argues, in great part through dance performance in an “erogenous zone in which the celebration of female sexuality and fertility is ritualized” (3, 17). Crossroads conference organiser Sonjah Stanley Niaah, who completed a PhD on dancehall at UWI in 2005, has also made an important contribution to its study, exploring the critical role of dancehall as a complex space for ritualised performance across Jamaican society.

But now I dropped the books and found myself deep in rhythm. Having left Kingston I caught a small bus with a couple of Israeli friends Joshua and Frank to the province of St Thomas in the east. After enjoying an ital meal at a rastatarian restaurant in Port Morant, we arranged a taxi ride up through the village of Bath to the Sulphur River gorge, the site of a hot springs renowned in Jamaica for its healing properties and rumoured to have been discovered by a runaway slave 400 years ago.


We’d planned to stay for a night before hitting the east coast, but the region proved too captivating for a short visit. The Bath Fountain Hotel has a lot going for it. It's built right on the creek in the gorge with roman bathhouses downstairs and surrounded by luscious visions. A back gate opens onto a path leading up to the magic place where hot water pours out near the base of a Cottonwood Tree, one of two such trees in the immediate area: “one in tree … tree in one” as I was educated by a local farmer. Outside the hotel, we meet Lena, a friendly and outgoing sugar cane farmer who introduces us to Buster who in his late 60s shifts a roots tonic concocted from local herbs and has been doing so from his road-side stall for decades, as his father before him. Its a genuine health tonic, but bitter tasting. Buster, who cuts us a few jellies (coconuts), presides over a rock pool in the creek below. Featuring a natural water slide, its full of kids and welcome respite from the heat.

Joshua and Lena with Buster at his "one stop shop".

Buster's water hole

Temperatures weren’t about to grow cooler, though, as we traveled to a couple of diverse bashments – one a smaller party towards Golden Grove in a yard at the Wheeler Field Booster Station on the edge of the sugarcane fields.

Earlier that day, Lena took us on a tour of her farm, her brother Fire Lion sitting outside his shack threading laces in his new white sneakers. He’d be wearing them that night. I also met Latoya, a waitress and short order cook at the hotel, who, as it turns out, is a member of local female dance posse The Trend Setters. Mild mannered waitress by day, voluptuous queen of the cane by night.

The following night, Lena and her friends drove us to a party down in Morant Bay. Our driver, Beres, ran low on fuel, and wouldn’t deviate for anything, including the dog he collected en route. The dying yelp and bone crunch never warranted so much as a blink from the man at the wheel. The brakes weren't applied. Sailing out of the hills into the late evening with the engine turned off to preserve fuel, the car came to a rest in a town where we refuelled and warded off an aggressive crack addict. The party attracted a more sophisticated crowd - many women in satin bustieres and fedoras with everything cropped for the eye, men in swanky suits and hats, crates of beer and the locally produced Tia Maria at their feet. Perhaps some had come from the funeral celebrations next door. By comparison to the cane fields party, where the PA fell out a few times and the MC competed with the audio, the Morant Bay gig had quality sound and excellent toasters.

At these all-night parties, drawn out and fatigued I ventured to a crossroads in electronic dance music culture, the home of the rave, if not the term “rave” itself, a possibility entertained by Helen Evans in “Out of Sight, Out of Mind: An Analysis of Rave Culture”. But unlike words like “rave” or “jungle”, “dancehall” is a fairly innocuous term for a dance music phenomenon, a term that struggles to capture the event it signifies, or the music and dance performed there, its concupiscence and promiscuity incomparable with dance practices in developed countries associated with rave, techno, psytrance etc... While what became known as "jazz" and "rock & roll" might have started in the dancehalls that had been the venues at which one's parents performed more orthodox dances, what has become one of Jamaica's most notorious recent exports retains the moniker as a self-identifying label, self-perpetuating in its ambiguous relationship with tradition. (As an aside, at least according to a posting in the wikepedia entry for Dancehall, apparently the “dance hall” was the term adopted for the cells adjacent to the electric chair at Sing Sing Prison where inmates condemned to death awaited their execution).

Dancehall has had a mixed reception in Jamaica. Perhaps the levels of shock, disdain and contempt issuing from local elites is a reaction to the threat to moral certainties and tradition inscribed in the term “dancehall” itself. At the same time, proponents of dancehall might have received mileage from their subversion of orthodoxy (from toppling the hall of dance) even while instituting another.

Speaking of such. By the end of my second week I was nearing Montego Bay for Sumfest having taken a detour on the beach at Runaway Bay on the north coast over several days.

The Hotel Nadine at Runaway Bay

Billed as "The Greatest Reggae Show on Earth" the week long Sumfest was in its 16th year. It was the culmination of my travels on the island and a celebration of the country's musical exports. I made it along to the Dancehall night, a platform for dozens of national heros who've made it, and are busy making it, into the Dancehall of fame. We had it all, from Anthony B’s strident homophobia to the goddess D'Angel who stole the show. But here, where MC superstars are so removed from the audience, where performers are separated from spectators by two VIP coralles, and viewers are cornered by rampant advertising, the concertised Sumfest is a spectacular illustration of how far dancehall may have strayed from its roots (i cant say anything about the reggae as i didnt attend Sumfest on the other nights).

D'Angel at Sumfest's Dancehall night

At Sumfest, dancehall was performed on the national stage. It was dancehall's night of the year, a performance for the networks and international audience, but my mind was turned from the 15,000 spectators, and the huge TV audience, to the nightworld of Kingston and beyond, to the events in the streets, yards, canefields and clubs where I'd encountered a people committed to the compulsion of giving it up like everybody’s watching.

I'd only touched the surface, but it was time to go...


Big ups to Ripley, Andrea Lewis, all the participants in the Uncertain Vibes panel (Hillegonda Rietveld, Anna Gavanas, Joshua Schmidt and Rob Lindop) along with Frank, Bradley, Sophia, Lena. Thanks and congratulations to Sonjah Stanley Niaah for organising the successful Crossroads conference and luring us all to Jamaica. Some parts of the sound system discussion are advanced in my forthcoming book Technomad. Thanks also to my generous hosts Coach Ted and Barbara Rose Johnston, who maintains a light on the truth with her recent publication The Consequential Damages of Nuclear War, Dallas and Erin in Venice Beach, and Jay Walsh who maintains San Francisco’s best couch.


Rasta roadhouse, near Bath

Image by Shiptu Shaboo

I arrive at an oasis at a bend in the creek. The gully rises to a stand of eucalypts on the far bank as a perfect glade rolls out under my feet. It’s an isolated camp ground, and in most circumstances more than suitable. But this is no ordinary circumstance.

I need elevation. Stumbling forward, I climb out of the gully and pick out a crest at the base of a ridgeline leading further up the mountain. Here, a wide branched acacia sheds long black seed-pods on a green ledge overlooking the Goomburra Valley. After the recent rains, it’s a luscious promontory about two clicks from the dance floor, the bass emanating from somewhere below, an overture to a darkening mood.

As I scuttle to the deck, incensed crows open up with a fusillade of invective. Blue patches flash through an oppressive grey, winds accelerate and recede, mirroring my internal undulations. Dried leaves on a fallen branch chatter like bearers of uncertain tidings. Sounds from a system rise through the trees, sunlight and breeze remastering melodies en route to my ears on this solitary mount under a non-ordinary tree. Its swollen trunk possessing unusual waistline markings, the acacia’s generous boughs offer its leaves all the sunlight they need on this day.

But on this day, the clouds do not hang idle. Forming a restless roof, they offer protection from sun exposure and dehydration. Yet blustery winds show me no quarter, scattering thoughts and voiding my stomach in accompaniment to the wind-warped bass. Carrot and chickpeas splutter forth in cannonades of bitter fluid. Coughing up my spleen so close to the sky, I give chunderous applause to the performances in the valley below, even while I remain, myself, a pathetic spectacle to the birds.

It’s mid February and I’ve ranged a long way up stream. This is Main Range National Park in Southern Queensland toward the end of a long wet subtropical summer. I am at the far boundary of Earthfreq, an electronic music festival in its third year operated by the elf-like Paul Abad, DJ/producer and founder of Subterran. How I arrived in this valley, in this condition, requires some backswinging.

Photo: Chris Jenkins

Several days before I was in Collingwood, Melbourne. Keele St to be precise, staying with my old friend Callum. A crossbreeding of SPECTRE’s Blofeld (minus the eyepatch) with Larry David, Callum is a PhD student at the University of Melbourne researching working class masculine narratives in film and literature. A local authority on “bogans”, “wogans” and “vogans”. But was he down with the entheogan? It was a haven in the tempest, the repartee welcome respite from the rigours of life at sea. But a storm front had been building. For two weeks I would throw lines at the bollards on Keele, sleeping no more than 4-5 hours a night in a front bedroom belonging to an absent housemate. In that time I imagined the room a cabin balanced on an unstable pier, lashed by howling winds and threatened by breakers. I also imagined one of the tenants, Kevin, a stealthy Korean IT worker who rarely left his room, performing a perverse sorcery deep into the night. I would become engulfed by a high-pressure system, mounting the ramparts, sweeping me off deck, setting me adrift.

From the Keele St pier, I cut the narrows of Smith St daily. With treacherous reefs and a weird rip, a confusion of TAB-centred desperation and Apology Week sentimentality, Smith St offered uncertain waters for the en-spirited voyager. A week passes into the next. Sometimes running errands, more frequently knowing no purpose, I cross into a subterranean delirium inhabited by dark archetypes, the dispossessed, and the disappeared. Its an inner city underworld populated by the shades of our selves, and other entities besides.

Gliding among shadows, one day I face off with a restless aya outside the Black Cat Café on Brunswick St, Fitzroy. Bearing rotten teeth and black eyes, a blemished-faced male about mid-twenties sat opposite cursing at some interference on an old Windows laptop. Unidentified hand gestures are performed in the space before him, and at me. Carving patterns in the air, it’s as though, a demiurge, he moves to conduct an unseen legion of shades through the device. Vulnerable, I feel host to an unusual presence. Would I disappear into the vortex opening before me? I bail before learning the answer.

The next day I enter Safeway at Smith and Hodgson. Several months before, at dusk in Friedrichstadt, Berlin, I descended the dark, cold and lonely grid of the “Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe”. Down there, after dark, camera-flashes illuminate specters inhabiting this field of concrete stelae testifying to a monstrous humanity. Specters or not, the truly frightful significance of this five acre work is that the boundary between the monument and the city around it is imperceptible. As paths descend in an undulating grid, stones on the sidewalk become low benches, then deeper slabs, and finally, the further one descends into the chilling complex, towering tombs, smooth and anonymous, leaning this way and that. Revealing how dehumanisation and horror are normalised via faint increments, pedestrians traverse the monument only seconds away.


But now, I was caught in the unforgiving glare of a modern supermarket, savings-seekers fated to stalk the aisles for the terms of their natural lives, and be doomed by their choices for eternity. This was but a minor excursion across the insidious architectonic of supermarkets. But hunkering down over an acre of cheese, stalking a gallery of slaughtered animals, withering in a clinic of commodity fetishism, I wondered if I had merely turned a corner in the concrete grid near the Brandenburg Gate. Rounding the aisle, shadow bands disfigure shelves pitching forward in a terrifying blur. I clutch my trolley against the compression. Feeling numb now, I descend the aisle and stand at the edge of the abyss. The horror! … The horror!

The charts had blown overboard. The captain’s logbook had vanished. And the needles in the systems gauges whirred. I had become a misshapen brigantine, a ship of the dark line. A phantom vessel named Lunacy ploughing the shopping lanes off Smith, disturbing the warning bells in the 12 Items or Less sluiceway. Jostling my trolley out into the lane, I arrive at a confluence. From here, I could become exiled to the high streets, plunder the trade routes of the inner city, sail into uncharted silence.

What spirit was abroad? What had gotten into my hold? An adequate answer may not ultimately arrive, but I will trace my wake back to late January, to the Rainbow Serpent Festival, the psychedelic trance and alternative lifestyle carnival in its 11th year near Beaufort outside Melbourne.

I caught a ride in back of a white Defender with John-Paris and his tall outrider Jules, neither of whom short of a smile and good humour, Paris a bloke George Johnston would have known as an “eternal barman”, Jules drawing back on a well crafted tube of Heavenly Music.

It's the tail end of January, and after two years on distant shores I returned to Australia, unloading from a Qantas airbus into the Rainbow Serpent festival. Head swimming in multiple time zones, I would enjoy the company of compatriots old and new, among them Alan “bags” Bamford, turning 50 on the dance floor, and travelling like someone half that age. Old ravers never die, they just ... never die.

A seasonal congress of all those knowing nods, smiles and infectious gestures, Rainbow is that rare symphony which makes an impression without too much pretension. Evoking an aesthetic combining larrikin with feralia, its population removed from the contessas of clubland or the alpha male posturing of the European trance circuit (e.g. German "Goa"). An avuncular topography, familiar but rarely short of surprises. While I’d travelled and lived in over a dozen countries in the previous two years, and while, as a Scout - and, what’s more, a patrol leader in the First Highton Rosellas - I’d learned to “Be Prepared”, I was ill-equipped for the foreign terrain I would soon enter.

Demolishing a single cone ice cream in front of a Mr Whippy van in the festival market, Martin was an unlikely shaman. Just down from us on this Sunday, 3,000 people were emptying their remnant sprite on the dance floor of the Market Stage, where my mate Shane was cutting shapes in the turf, a ribbon of his great grandfather’s service medals pinned to his jacket. It was Australia Day weekend, and, surrendering to the rhythms performed by local legend Andrew Till, a legion of trance troopers, these baked and bronzed diggers of dance, were earning their decorations.

Photo: Ronnie Simulacrum

A Song - Tim Parish



Around dusk the evening before, thousands gathered to witness an Opening Ceremony unparalleled in the history of Australian outdoor dance events. It was an elaborate Welcome to Country evolving considerably from former events to become a popular interactive spectacular. With a sand mandala on the dance floor (a serpent encircled earth depicting the Australian landmass), Uncle Ted’s welcome to country, a smoke cleansing ceremony, ochre-caked Koorie women and men performing dance, and a parade of honour, the event featured the kind of spiritually charged and cheese-injected flamboyance that Australians manage so well. At one point the crowd was singing the “I am/We are Australian” song at the behest of one of the older aunties present. Even the Japanese onlookers were lip-synching the Telstra anthem. Later, the MC’s had us all touching earth and sky and blessing the dance ground for a serious stomp.


Photo: Tom Andrews




































Photo: Ronnie Simulacrum


A variety of the scenes endogenous to Rainbow, along with various luminaries, were applauded as they paraded the outer circumference of the sand mandala. In costume, waving flags, raising cheers, they were introduced by the MCs. The parade of honour featured pagans, eco-warriors, peace activists, stilt walkers, fluffy ravers, and a woman in blue knee-length satin, her dress patchworked with countless Union Jacks and Southern Crosses, an ostentatious Aussie flaggette. This flourish struck me. It was an enfreaked version of the Olympic Games Opening Ceremony in Sydney 2000, which itself featured a smoking ceremony, Central Desert women performing a segment of the Seven Sisters dance, and, of course, a pageant parade. Like that event, the current proceedings were crowded with variety show entertainment. Hey Hey It’s Rainbow. But lets not forget that this intercultural ceremony evolved from the same commitment to legitimacy and belonging that filtered into the Olympics ceremonies, a desire building through decades of resistance and now apparently blooming at a time when even the most power-charged building on the continent – Parliament House – gets a smoking (on 13th February 2008 when in-coming Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, delivered the long-awaited apology to members and descendents of the Stolen Generations). But we were a long way from Stadium Australia, and Canberra. The guy in front of me was more likely on mushies than Fosters.

It’s a curious juncture, that place where the carnival (the place and time where truths are ruptured, authorities are lampooned and hierarchies inverted) and the ceremony (where religious and cultural authorities are propitiated and reaffirmed) collide. Where excess and abandonment rub up against ethos and law. Where parody penetrates pride. The RSF Opening Ceremony was that confluence, its atmosphere drawing from a mixture of laughter rippling across the crowd, and solemnity, a dutiful commitment to perform what is right. This mixture of joy and duty was also apparent at the Green Energy Stage operated by the Red Bus crew which was powered by 100% renewable energy (solar panels, wind turbines and bio-diesel) and evoked a desire for sustainable living practices as illustrated by carbon credit initiatives, composting toilets, recycling bins and the commitment to composting around site and in the market (where stall holders were obliged to use biodegradable plates, cups, bowls and cutlery). And somewhere in the conflation there’s theatre, like the Nomadic Nymphs who wandered the festival "in search of their lost love and life source", water. Pleasure cross-fading with drama, for its scale (maybe 7,500 people in 2008), Rainbow Serpent is at the leading global edge of alternative dance festivals.

Photo: sensesmaybenumbed

Photo: Chris Jenkins

But down in the market, I’m preoccupied with other matters. For one thing, I’d been invited to my old friend Phil’s place in Keilor East where Martin was holding a small ayahuasca circle.

Two days after the festival I find Martin grinning mischievously over the stove in Phil’s kitchen under a flight path of Tullamarine airport. Pieces of a fat Banisteriopsis caapi vine containing harmala alkaloids are bubbling away in a pot. Experienced with entheogens, Phil knows a smile himself. Decorated with statues, hand paintings, and wood carvings of varying spiritual traditions, the house is a suburban temple. The mood is calm, and there is no agenda, though it’s conveyed that going in with a personal intention is normal practice. I bring to mind the endeavour to “stay the course”, to remain committed to the role of storytelling, to document the lives and works of others, to contribute to the collective canvas, or some such. We had boarded, were taxiing for departure, the climb angle and destination unknown. Cushions, blankets, jugs of water, candles, and buckets … deep buckets … lined the apron.

Having fasted for a day, that night in Keilor East I drain off a cup of freshly prepared syrup. It’s nauseatingly bitter. Now night, the door to the backyard open, I lay back into the cushions and close my eyes. Over the next hour or so, foregrounding the ambient notes of Don Peyote, Ishq, and Pete Namlock, in the periphery of my vision there appear bust-like forms, some strangely familiar, glissading to meet my gaze, then vanishing as my mind pursues them. About an hour later, critical to the ritual, the potion is chased down with 200 mgs of DMT prepared from Australian wattle (Acacia). Sometime afterwards, I sense liquids snaking about my stomach and intestines, scanning my internal architecture. A sinuous sentience coursing through my body, hairline cracks forming on the lining of my guts. I form a sensation that wisdom, a perennial gnosis, is present, yet remains occulted, locked in an impenetrable black box. What was this device, and, more to the point, what lay inside? Could it be cranked like a phonograph? Would my ears interpret its frequencies? I seem to have become a caricature grinding this esoteric hardware. Sometime later, staggering with uncanny precision, I find the toilet. Rushing to unbuckle my belt, my backside smacks the seat and I perform a powerful liquid evacuation.

The others present vomit throughout the night, some spectacularly, poking fingers back to force the purge, up-ending to the accompaniment of Adham Shaikh. It was a savage soundbath. And amid the chorus, I detect Martin whispering to someone/something. The flight controller perhaps? While not joining the spontaneous acoustic bucket band, I’d overseen the spirit’s discharge astern. An end to the occupation. Anchorage in a calm harbour. Touch down. Or so I imagined. But I was unaware that the incursion was far from over. To remain at sea for weeks to come.

That morning, I departed the western suburbs for Collingwood, drifting, as it transpired, into a hypnagogic fugue. Afflicted by abdominal pressure, broadsided by dark influences, nauseated in the inner suburbs, I was swept into a lunar maelstrom, directed by a power stranger than fiction. In Collingwood, I developed an acute awareness of a hinge complaining ceaselessly on the door to the otherworld. At once, a dark recess formerly unobserved, and an arc from a lantern swinging there. A warning? A beckoning? I couldn’t be certain. But if ayahuasca holds a torch to the shadows, dispatches rangers into forgotten places, rendering inviolability history, its tendrils also reach out to compatriots in and of the Other, compelling one to seek both the Other and “the others", or indeed the Othering others.

And so, I waxed for an afternoon with Eamon “Jungle” Wyss, in the backyard atrium on Keele, under a lemon tree. Foregrounding a slanted sky, he sat on a bench transferring data. Jungle co-founded Melbourne’s Psycorroboree, whose sonic outlands, the Gaian Thump festivals, evolved into the Mythopoeia Gathering held at Opoeia, an Eco-Arts Retreat operating in the Angahook State Forest until 2007. These were formative gatherings in Melbourne underculture and its many afterparties. An unassuming and expansive weaver of threads, Jungle is also an unofficial doorman. Caretaker of the threshold. A midwife to the event horizon. After all, Opoiea means “to make open”.

The sun pierced the waters, washing me in a new light. Under these refractions, one afternoon in the narrows of Smith, my prow broke the surface and made toward anchorage. Churning in the shallows on an uneven keel, that day, during a partial solar eclipse, I made interception with the Kent St pub, a perfect bucket shop for a disembodied seaman. Seated el fresco with Undergrowth’s Tim Parish, Sarah McDonald, and Order of ChAOS magickian Orryelle Defenestrate-Bascule, we poured over Orryelle’s “esoterotic” sketches, a magickal union of opposites sprouting from a sketch-pad, and to be reproduced in hir new "Graphic Grimmoire" Conjunctio. I’d met Orryelle back in the mid-1990s at ConFest, back when s/he and, Metamorphic Ritual Theatre Co and The Mutation Parlour had mounted the unforgettable interactive ritual The Labyrinth. Drawing on Greek and other mythologies, the ritual theatre had Theseus slaying the Minotaur, the beast within. It struck me that the re-convergence with this trickster of myth, language, gender and transformation, this tireless chthonic syncretist, was, at this time, no small coincidence.


And so it was like this, bobbing on the surface, plummeting to unusual depths and rocketing through the clouds, waning and waxing in an occult odyssey, that I spent two weeks in Collingwood.

My weary rig approached a critical horizon twelve moons from drinking the “vine of the souls”. I’d spent several hours that day in the Edinburgh Gardens off the shores of tranquility, but the winds were again picking up, the seas had grown menacing, and shadow bands raced towards the horizon. Earlier that night, in despair, I phoned friends seeking solutions to worsening spells of nausea, and imagined organ failure. I was vacillating. The pier had collapsed. Memories drowned in rapid review as I plunged into darkness. Dragged by turbulence along the seabed, disturbed sediment rose in clouds. The waters turned overcast, and ... I needed to vomit. I opened my eyes, lifted my head above the surface and sucked in a deep breath. I began heaving, violently. Dry-reaching, for the first time since that night under the flight path.

And thus, it commenced. That night, ascending, I floated subsurface, riding warm numinous currents, passing into unmeasured ecstasy. Beaching at high tide, I was saturated by wave upon wave of hallucinations. The convulsions triggered a euphoric surge through my systems equipment, precipitating a long rapturous duration. The floodgates opened, the flight data had been accessed, and although I’d not a processor capable of handling this raw information deluge, these were the most overwhelming readouts on record. Surfacing repeatedly, I found myself blowing like a whale. I came about, and the experience was unparalleled.

The Night Doctors - Tim Parish

Though many have it that a saturation point may be achieved around 6 hours from consumption, two weeks from ground zero I seemed to have acquired what some call the “ayahuasca afterglow”. But in the calm waters of the following day, questions mounted. Principally this: had I located my Kurtz, and taken him out, before becoming him? Had I defeated the Minotaur? Willard had hacked down the Colonel with a machete. Theseus finished the beast with Ariadne’s sword and returned using a ball of thread. I hadn’t even a Leatherman Micra. A miraculous reversal had occurred, a tidal transit. Yet, like buckled flotsam, I lay ashore, foundering, without definition or clarity.

Loading my pack, I knew that I should leave these metropolitan shores and journey up river. To the headwaters, if necessary.

Photo: Ronnie Simulacrum

It was necessary. And so, two days later, having arranged a cheap flight to Dr Dave’s place, I washed ashore at Sunrise Beach near Noosa Heads on Queensland's Sunshine Coast. In the land of the gated golfing estate and doggie hydro-bathing services, heavy-bassed havens of dissent shelter by storm-wracked beaches. But, I was compelled to see a mountain range rise between myself and Golf Country. And so, nauseated in the tropics, I applied the wax and goofyfooted the estuary to Earthfreq, a “tribal” outpost 300 kilometers south up the Goomburra Valley.

Photo: Ronnie Simulacrum

It was a four hour drive from the coast. I arrived late Saturday, and crashed.

With Sun Control Species, Antix, Spoonbill and Abad himself on the Sunday bill, the day held much promise... But there’s nothing like well-made plans gone south. And magnetic south they went. Around midmorning, I wandered to the floor greeting a few old friends en route, among them wise and delightful zine queen and Earthdream veteran Kathleen Williamson. On the dancefloor brothers Tetrameth and Shadow FX were collaborating in the mix, with doofers performing vertical re-entries on the lip of a fierce rhythm. But I was floored by the vocal sample amplified at the moment I entered the dancescape. It was from, as I later discerned, Tron's bowl-quaking "Amasonic" : "ayaaaa... huasca...... this is the other psychoactive beverage," which in that moment evoked an extreme state of duende consequent to consumption. It wasn’t so unusual. After all, an entheogenic sensibility has proliferated within this scene, an encounter with otherness promoted from its foundations through sonic, visual, and textual media. But, it struck me as ominous, a perceptual cue hailing me like a harbour beacon rocking in a gale, a signal becoming visceral as my guts churned, ears thumped, and the music grew inaudible. I was stranded beachside on a sea of nausea. And it was king tide.

Agoraphobic mid-dance floor. Perhaps I shouldn’t have had those space laced fruit loops for breakfast. Nor the Boags I cracked afterwards. It was as if the sentient Bar Keep had looked the intruders square in the eyes and, pointing to the exit, demanded “YOU… OUT”. And so, marooned, still, I was compelled to show the nuisance the door. Wasn’t going quietly. But this was Bar Keep’s orders.

I had to evacuate myself from the area, before total immobilization. Fleeing up the valley, I traced the winding creek bed away from the party.

And so it was, meandering, in search of elevation, that I found the promontory and its acacia, under which I’d collapsed. The handle had been wound to its limit. Jeers erupted from the bush balconies. And my terrible cache would finally exhaust. If La Purge was a one-man circus staged above the headwaters, this may have been its dismal finale. A murder of critics hectoring the clown to the death, as rain squalls over a distant range…. And what was that slithering away into the undergrowth?

Sun Control Species was playing now, I imagined, drifting. Hours pass, and at some point the tide must have turned. The pall had lifted, the winds softened and a new light angled through the branches. The show over, the crows had grown satisfied, and the acacia bore a curious elegance. This was no ordinary tree, and I felt sheepish in its presence. I held it for a duration and stepped gingerly about my ridgeline station absorbing surrounding views through the eyes of a neophyte. It was as if I'd dwelt there for years, committing minute details to memory.

As distant kookaburras break their silence I descend from my mount through the long incline of sclerophyll. Upon the final approach to the gully at the familiar bend in the creek, I lurch sideways to avoid a large spider’s web. But then, a commotion freezes me in my tracks. I turn to look. A eucalypt is set in the gully wall. Like an angled chimney, its thick roots are visible as the wall drops to a serene rock pool and a green glade beyond. On the tree’s trunk in full repose and with neck and chest flared, there emerges the finest goanna I've ever set eyes on. Having jumped from its blocks further up the tree, its bulk now progressed in slow motion with the thinnest of heads falling slowly in my direction. It is an enormous Lace Monitor, maybe 1.3m in length. The guardian of the gully. A keeper to the mysteries. The sitter. And it is as if he is stating: “Go now … but remember, you are not alone”.

Painting: Natalie Bateman

“I understand”, I whisper, stepping across the creek to the glade beyond. I move to the bank opposite the serpent, his elevated eyes tracking every step. Forming an S on the trunk above, he gradually re-assimilates into the tree. Crouching, I dip a head cloth in the pool and wash my face. Glancing about the glade, I feel like I’ve been leveled by a cosmic steamroller.

It was three weeks since the intervention in Keilor East. I’d skippered my rig round the Horn in violent seas, emerging, finally, under watchful eyes. Out there, at the furthest edge of the dance floor, I’d given my black box a crank. Kurtz had received a decent hiding, though I knew implicitly that he lurks, still, in the hinterlands.

And so, as the sun meets the horizon, awakening from this trance, I wander back to face the music…

Photo: Jamard

Thanks to Tim Parish, Shiptu Shaboo and Natalie Bateman for their art reproduced here; to Ronnie Simulacrum, Chris Jenkins, Andrew Ford, Tom Andrews, Sensesmaybenumbed and Jamard for their great photos. And big thanks also to Callum Scott for sound advice on the narrative.

Alien Bride. Photo: Kyle Hailey

This post offers a brief history of electronic dance music culture at Burning Man, referencing vectors of resistance and expression within EDMCs that are explored further in my forthcoming book Technomad: Global Raving Countercultures. Towards the end there's some loose comments about the curious interfacing of desert and city, as the begoggled second life merges with the first.

In attending to electronic dance music, I recognize that Burning Man is most certainly not a dance festival or a “rave”, that it hosts many different styles of music, and is, moreover, a site of multiple performance genres, visionary and fire arts. At this point it should be noted that while Burning Man is frequented by a growing population of those who might identify as "technomadic" (i.e. geek nomads and mobile digerati whose "anywhere/anytime" internet connectivity enables rootless business and lifestyle practices), the "techno" explicit to my discussion is specifically related to electronic music practices.

Burning Man, 2007. Scott London.


Metaraving: Bright Lights and Sweet Spots

Burning Man is an annual festival held on the vast canvas of an ancient lake bed (called the "playa") in the Black Rock Desert, northwestern Nevada. As an unparalleled universe of radical self-expression and non-dogmatic ritual initiated on San Francisco’s Baker Beach by Larry Harvey and Jerry James in 1986, Burning Man would become, following its transition to the Black Rock Desert in 1990, an outlandish pilgrimage center for alternative art and performance communities in the Bay Area, the West Coast, across the US, and around the world. The event is backed by decades of Californian freaklore. In his discussion of the “cults of Burning Man”, Erik Davis (2005: 17) outlines “cultural patterns” manifesting in this “promiscuous carnival of souls, a metaphysical fleamarket, a demolition derby of reality constructs colliding in a parched void”. Refractions of Californian spiritual counterculture more generally, these milieus of participant gravitation—the Cult of Experience, the Cult of Intoxicants, the Cult of Flicker, the Cult of Juxtapose, and the Cult of Meaningless Chaos—are cultures of performance and praxis overlapping with on-site vibe tribes, and their variant styles.

With a diverse array of musics ranging from neo-tribal rhythms, breakbeat and hip hop to lofty intelligent soundscapes alongside jazz and punk rock etc, as Robert Kozinets and John Sherry (2004: 289) point out, “multiple musics demarcate, blend and merge on geographic boundaries, spilling into one another … pooling into pure concentrations near encamped banks of speakers”. In this staged city such “pure concentrations” may coincide with the concentrations of responsibility constituted in Dionysian, outlaw, exile, avant-garde, spiritual and other vectors emerging within electronic dance music culture and gaining admission to this outland. As an ocean of vibes orchestrated and nurtured by “tribes” trained in these “cultic” practices and amplifying variant audiotronics, this vast counter-matrix appears as a miscegeny of bright lights and sweet spots, a sonic hyper-liminal zone like that which I experienced on my initial visit to Black Rock City in 2003 when I camped with the crew at Low Expectations right by the House of Lotus dance camp.

Burning Man was and never will be a “rave”. Yet its status as “the ultimate metarave” (the phrase comes from tireless media producer and impressario Michael Gosney who initiated San Francisco's Digital Be-Ins) seems to have solidified in recent years. In 2006, the year of my most recent Burn, the evidence was manifest in the wake of the torching of the 40 foot figure—the city’s limit experience which sees most of its inhabitants and hundreds of “art cars” encircle the blazing Man, with the scene approximating the Drive-in At the End of Time. Packed with fireworks and mortar-rockets, the towering icon cascades with sparks and bursts apart in a spectacular series of detonations, its demise willed by the bold and the sumptuous who've arrived in their tens of thousands. Kozinets and Sherry (2004: 293) suggest that “like many elements of post-rave, the burning of the Man opens up opportunities to embody a popular dance orgiasm facilitated by modern technologies”. Following the burn in 2006 I realized what they meant, for I found myself amidst mobile dance camps who’d unloaded their systems equipment, in one case go go cages, and were pumping bass and breaks across the alkaline desert night, attracting thousands of Burners wired-up and el-wired.
Photo by Scott London

This post-burn tradition goes back to 1997 to the unassumingly named “Community Dance” event. Operated by Gosney’s Radio-V, San Francisco’s Anon Salon along with the pioneer Howard St warehouse party collective the Consortium of Collective Consciousness (CCC), Dimension 7 and LA’s Tonka sound system (not to be confused with the original UK outfit by that name), that event featured trance progenitor Goa Gil (who played for 7 hours).
Photo: Scott London
But standing tall beyond this was the most outlandish scene of all: “Uchronia” an installation 200 feet long, 100 feet wide and 50 feet tall, funded by Belgian artists and built using rejected timber from a Canadian lumber mill by dozens of volunteers. Used in the title of Charles Renouvier’s 1876 novel Uchronie (L’Utopie dans l’histoire) and replacing topos (place) from ‘utopia’ (which literally means ‘no place’) with chronos (time) to generate a word that literally means no time, “uchronic” refers to an “alternate history” that enables its observers to question their reality. For its creators, Uchronia was a “portal, showing us what the world could be like if creativity ruled supreme” and time is hung differently . What one observer in the San Francisco Chronicle described as a “giant’s haystack twisted into a computer model of a wave with curved entrances on three sides”, was thus an intentional parallel-world posing the question to its occupants (“Uchronians”) in the fashion alternate histories pose for their readers: “what if?” And the principal activity within this time-machine, this spatio-temporal question mark in which most were undoubtedly oblivious to its meaning intellectually yet might have understood viscerally? With the desert night a welcome reprieve from the frying sun and white-outs, its occupants bathed in neon-green light, what would become more widely known as “the Belgian Waffle” was a dance club. And of course, on the final night, it burned.














With its image seared into my retinas for almost a week, Uchronia became a cavernous conflagration, an allegory of impermanence, the flaming whispers of which engulfed all who bore witness. In the wake of its desolation, on the celebratory margins of its dissolution, sensual acts of beauty transpired in blinking conclaves upon the playa. In its remarkably short life, surely one of the most spectacular clubs ever created.

One of the other huge structures on the playa in 2006 was the Connexus Cathedral, which was a dance club over the main nights.
Photos by Scott London and Steve Fritz.


The Techno Ghetto

But it wasn’t always like this. What was then known as “rave” music was first amplified at Burning Man in 1992 when a small “rave camp” appeared a mile from the main encampment, “glomming parasitically”, according to Brian Doherty’s account in This is Burning Man: The Rise of a New American Underground (2004: 66), “onto the Porta-Johns.” The camp was organized by Craig Ellenwood of the early Oakland acid party crew Mr Floppy’s Flophouse. The headline act was Goa Gil, who played from Aphex Twin’s “Digeridoo” on digital audio tape to no more than 25 people. Also playing to hardly anybody were Brad Tumbleweed, Dave Synthesis (aka “Dsyn”), Craig and Terbo Ted. Terbo Ted has the mantle of being the first person to DJ at Burning Man. Ted informed me that in 1992 he “played on Friday afternoon to literally no one, with only ten miles of dust in front of me. It was awesome”. While he can’t recall it with precision, the first track played was some “spacey stuff” from a Jean Michel Jarre 12 inch from Craig Ellenwood’s record pile, “a record he was willing to sacrifice to the elements … it was literally a sound check” (ibid). Here is a link to a short excerpt from Terbo Ted’s live acid techno set in 1995, which was the first electronic music recorded at Burning Man to be released on CD (“Turbine time” on Shag).

These years were sparse to say the least. As Charles A. Gadeken reported in 1993: "I remember going out to the rave camp, it was five guys, a van, a couple of big speakers, a card board box covered in tin foil, colored lights and a strobe light. It was all cool". But the reception was generally less than enthusiastic. Ted recalls how the punk (add your own prefix: anarcho, cyber, steam, shotgun, etc) sensibilities predominating held DJ culture complicit with “consumer society and a stain on an otherwise anarchistic, art-oriented event”. On one morning near sunrise in 1993,
a hippy dude came up to me while I was playing music on the sound system and he holds up a knife towards me and yells “are you crazy?” And I say “no, you’re the one with a knife”. And then he says he’s going to cut me or the speakers. So I turn it down, ditched the decks and circled far and wide off into the desert. He tried to cut the speaker cones with his knife but they had metal grills on the fronts, he looked like a fool and gave up and wandered off. I put on a cassette of Squeeze’s Black Coffee in Bed as he was walking away.Burning Man forced the techno reservationists to maintain their isolation a mile from Main Camp between 1992 and 1996, during which time the camp evolved into a kind of outlaw satellite of Black Rock City. Over the following two years, San Francisco’s DiY music and culture collective SPaZ (itself co-founded by Ted and D syn, along with Aaron, No.E Sunflowrfish and various others) orchestrated the sounds exclusively. It was extreme, eclectic and haphazard. Ted recalls that at one point in 1993 “we put on a cassette of the Eagles’ Hotel California by request of these two cowboys who rode in from the desert on horseback. They were thrilled.” According to Aaron, that same year “a wind storm blew down our speaker stacks, but they were still plugged in and we never stopped playing”. Listed as the official “rave” in the Burning Man brochure for 1994, SPaZ would effect a great influence on sound system culture at the festival.

Burning Man, 1995 CCC.












In these years, SPaZ, members of which later initiated the Autonomous Mutant Festival, were effectively encouraging Burning Man to be “more like the UK festival vibe where anybody could bring their sound, big or small”. So, in 1995, while SPaZ set up their small system at four points amplifying everything from minimal techno and drum-n-bass to psytrance under a four story three-cornered scaffolding with lights and “variously garish and random streamers, banners and tarps, from punk to dayglo-indian-balinese-cybertrance-batiks to outright monstrosities” visible from Main Camp, Wicked (the famed UK derived outfit who held full moon and other parties on beaches and in parks around the Bay area between 1991-1996) arrived with their turbo rig and scaffolding supporting their black and white banner. SPaZ hosted artists including Minor Minor (Gateway), Theta Blip, Chizaru and Subtropic. Featuring himself, with DJs Markie and Bay area guest’s Spun, Felix the Dog, Rob Doten and Alvaro, Wicked co-founder (and now running Grayhound Records) Garth stated to me that they “played for 4 days and nights through hail, wind, rain and electrical storms”. North America's first free party tekno sound system, Pirate Audio, also made an appearance that year. On the windblown frontiers of techno, in this nascent vibrant ghetto accommodating the eclectic, experimental and inclusive sounds of SPaZ, the house sounds of Wicked, and other sounds besides, Burning Man had begun to attract a variety of socio-sonic aesthetics, paving the way for the mega-vibe it would later become.

In this period, besides differences between the habitués and proponents of varying dance aesthetics (from the inclusive to the more proprietary) there was considerable conflict between those who regarded themselves true Burners and those they held as little more than raving interlopers. As Ted remembers, “ravers were always pariahs at Burning Man …. it’s like we were the poor people on the wrong side of the tracks and the wrong side of the man”. At one event, a bag of human excrement was dropped on the dance camp from a low flying aircraft. According to Garth, Burning Man had the porta-potties removed from the rave camp before the festival ended. “When people started crapping on the desert for lack of options, someone carried over a bag to main camp .... Burning Man was so enraged by this they flew over and apparently dropped it on one camp."

1996 was the year of the “techno ghetto”, the brainchild of Terbo Ted and an attempt to make the ghettoized rave camp a legitimate outer suburb of Black Rock City (BRC). According to Ted, who had the support of Burning Man organizers, as a “mega-theme camp” the “techno ghetto” idea was a “fractalized imprint” of BRC’s Main Camp at the time. “We were into pre-planned zoning, using surveying flags to plot out an orbital city with sound systems on the outer ring and encampments in the center”. “Ghetto” sound systems included SPaZ, the CCC, Gateway and Wicked. Together with a live PA from local electronic producers E.T.I. and Astral Matrix, Wicked DJs played along with DJ Dimitri of Dee-Lite all performing under a projection pyramid constructed by VJ and laser outfit Dimension 7.

The "rave camp" in 1996, Mickey.

But, things didn’t go according to plan in the ghetto. According to Garth, “the honeymoon ended that year. The theme was “Hellco” and that was what they conjured up… by this point there were too many [sound systems], all bleeding into each other…. it felt more like a super club on the playa”. As Terbo Ted recalls, the “ghetto” was an “abysmal failure … DiY gone mad… Music snobbery and cliquishness and DiY anarchist tendencies prevented an orderly camp from forming and the resulting spread-too-thin sprawl proved to be dangerous in an era when cars were still driving at every vector on the playa at high speeds in dust storm white outs”. Both Garth and Ted are in part referring to a tragic incident in 1996 when three people were seriously injured sleeping in their tent near the Gateway sound system, one in a coma for months, after being collected by a stoned driver. Together with an apparent perception that the “rave” was giving Burning Man a bad name within official circles, and the likelihood that techno was perceived as disturbing electronic chatter for many participants (including Doherty, who recounts hostilities in This is Burning Man, 2004: 171-173), this incident generated an unofficial “anti-rave policy”, which was effectively countered through the compromise entailed in Gosney’s innocuously named “Community Dance” in 1997.

The Veg-O-Matic of the Apocalypse vs Goa Gil

That known DJs were being targeted by Burning Man organisers was a circumstance endured by Paul D. Miller (aka DJ Spooky), who was apparently pursued on the playa by “Pipi Longstocking” in the mid 1990s. But the tension between ravers and Burners seems to have been appropriately dramatized in a performance which saw a standoff between Goa Gil and a giant peddle-powered flamethrowing drill and Margarita maker called the Veg-O-Matic of the Apocalypse—or, more to the point, anti-rave crusader Jim Mason who was peddling the beast. Mason’s Veg-O-Matic is described by Robert Gelman in his article Trial by Fire: “It’s straight out of hell, suggesting engineering from the industrial revolution transported to Fritz Lang's Metropolis. Part vehicle, part flame-thrower, part earth drilling device, I envision this machine being used to battle creatures in a 1950s monster movie, or to torture souls of the damned in the realm of satan”. With a pressurized gas-charger spurting flames as far as seventy feet from its barrel, and a gathering mob inciting it to greater acts of destruction, the Veg-O-Matic was known to burn installations in its path following the demise of the Man. On its post-Burn rampage, when the Veg-O-Matic rolled into the first Community Dance camp in 1997, Mason found Goa Gil directly in his path:
The crew of the machine is tilting the flamethrower’s barrel up at the console. Gil is staring down the 12-foot barrel of this jet powered char-broiler. I had to remind myself that this is theatre, or is it? I’m still not sure. “Burn it!” the mob chants, “Burn THEM!” Like an opposing pacifist army, the ravers are standing their ground, some shouting in defiance of the threat, some in disbelief that this could really be happening. Chicken John, like the demented circus ringmaster that he is, issues his now-familiar warning over the bullhorn [“Stand Aside”]. We seem to have travelled back centuries in time. I don’t remember ever feeling farther from home than this.Photo by Leo Nash



















The mob were even demanding Led Zeppelin. It was perhaps in this moment so far from Kansas—when Gil stood his ground, even turned the volume up, in the face of obliteration—that EDMC gained credibility at Burning Man. Yet such gains are not synonymous with legitimacy. To this day, disputes rage over the validity of arrant “loudsters”, “monotonous computer loop music,” and the presence of some of the highest paid DJ brand names like Paul Oakenfold and Tiesto. See, for example, this discussion on tribe.net. When the biggest names in commercial dance music perform “45-minute showcase sets to massive crowds at MTV-Beach-Party-style setups”, it is recognized to be the “EDM equivalent of putting a Starbucks or H&M on the Esplanade”. In a typically avant response, which notably does not reject electronic music, the author of this comment, ST Frequency, states in a post on Reality Sandwich that he would rather “something a little more eclectic and unexpected, like funky industrial bluegrass, or ambient dub-zydeco” than “a cacophony of 22 differentepic trance records ‘blowing up’ from every imaginable direction”.

A Rhythm Remorseless

While concerns are held about the presence of what Mark Van Proyen refers to as the “Ibiza set” and other “tourists” swamping the festival (in Gilmore 2006: 151), after several Community Dance events, which were promoted by producer Gosney’s Radio-V as a “techno tribal ritual celebration” (involving the likes of Gil, Shpongle, Ollie Wisdom, AB Didge, Medicine Drum, Kode IV, Tsuyoshi, X-Dream, Nick Taylor and Tristan, and with contributions from techno-tribes such as the CCC, Anon Salon, Koinonea, Sacred Dance Society and Dimension 7), the audiotronics and culture of post-rave would become integral to the event.











Blue Room fire truck, 1998, CCC.








Simon Posford at the Community Dance camp 1999. Landon Elmore.

In 1998, a community sound system featuring New York's Blackkat collective, The Army of Love, SPaZ and Arcane was unpacked on the playa. Holding their own desert dance gatherings over the previous five years in the Mojave, Moontribe also set up that year, with artists performing for three consecutive nights next to The Temple of Rudra, with the final party drawing 2000 people following Pepe Ozan’s opera. Symptomatic of the ongoing tensions, as Ozan apparently neglected to inform the Burning Man organization about his deal with Moontribe (they were providing the soundcheck for his opera), the event’s unique peace keepers, the Black Rock Rangers, unplugged the generator at dawn on the first night. With the all-too-familiar experience of having “Rangers” shut them down, Moontribe’s Treavor successfully pushed for an agreement for an all-night party after the opera on the Friday night, which also happened to be a full moon. According to Treavor, with himself, Petey and Matthew Magic performing: “we kicked in with some full on Psy Trance/Techno madness and tons of people came over and stayed in front of our system until around noon when it was about 110 degrees and time to end”. Given their commitment to throwing free Full Moon Gatherings in the Mojave desert since 1993 in the face of considerable adversity (remote conditions, the law and internal conflicts included), a Moontribe association would draw considerable kudos in an environment which would continue to contest the presence of “commercial muzack”.

Community Dance lasers 1998, Michael Gosney.
Full Moon morning, Burning Man 1998, from Fusion Anomaly.

Radio-V's Flying Saucer dance disc, 2000. Michael Gosney.

Conflict continued at the turn of the Millennium. Thus, after threatening to douse the mixer and CDJs, the Burning Scouts of Gigsville camp (home to the "Burning Scouts of America", i.e. those who are "too cool, dumb, weak, punk or gay to have made it in the Boy or Girl Scouts") decided to execute their community service at Radio-V’s Flying Saucer in 2000. The CCC’s Brad Olsen remembers the scene on Sunday morning:
[The Burning Scouts] appeared walking around our camp, coming at us banging on pots and pans, no expressions on their faces, as they slowly made their way over to our RV. They must have thought Sunday morning we were all crashed out and they were going to teach us what making racket was all about! We looked on in amazement. When [one assailant] attempted to come into the RV someone threw old bath water at him and we closed the door. After they left we came out and noticed that they pulled down our art and banners and vandalized the camp. We broke our camp and slowly drove over to the CCC system on the other side where DJ Perez (Perry Ferrel from Jane's Addiction) was just coming on (& so were we still). He added, alluding to the rumour that there was a “quite” and noisy” side to BRC, “that was the last of the ‘Quiet Side’ myth”. Now the sound systems are ubiquitous on both sides -- but it wasn't without heavy resistance!” Ultimately, internal compromises, collaborations and concessions within Burning Man would see what was initially a source of much derision and contempt—and ghettoized one mile from Main Camp—gain greater acceptance within its sprawling inner but mostly outer conclaves (the loudest camps are now placed in the "Large Scale Sound Art Zone" at the periphery of the city, where speakers must be faced away from the city, and where a maximum power amplification of 300 watts is permitted).

Burning Man art project funding reveals the persistence of an uneasy relationship. As author of the forthcoming ethnography on Burning Man (Theater in a Crowded Fire), Lee Gilmore, informed me: “many organizers of dance oriented theme camps complain that the Burning Man Organization never funds their artistic contributions, so they have to foot the bill themselves. For their part, the organization says they simply have limited resources and other priorities. And that the EDMC scene has many other self-funding and/or commercial venues.” In 1998, the “techno ghetto” was no more. By 1999, when the final Community Dance camp was staged in Landon Elmore's recreation of the Barbury Triangle Crop Circle, the sounds of psytrance, breakbeats, tribal house etc had become flush with the soundscape of Burning Man.


















Aerial view of Community Dance Camp 1999. Barbury Triangle Crop Circle. Landon Elmore.

Emerald City, 2000. Michael Gosney
In 2000, eccentric inventor Patrick Flanagan funded Emerald City, a one-time dance camp extravaganza with Joegh Bullock and Gosney providing the entertainment. By 2007, with Large-Scale Sound Art Camps like the Opulent Temple of Venus, Lemuria and the Connexus Cathedral, electronic dance music culture had become integral to Burning Man. The audio-visual aesthetics and style of venues are diverse: from performance troupe's like El Circo with their post-apocalyptic "dreamtime imagery" and Bag End sound system to the Deep End groovement; from salacious theme camps like Bianca’s Smut Shack and Illuminaughty, to the Rhythm Society’s Blyss Abyss or the Church of WOW chill camp (which seeded Gosney's Cyberset artist family and label) and the recent Sacred Water Temple; and from fixed sound art installations like the House of Lotus to mobile units such as the Space Cowboys "All-Terrain Audio Visual Assault Vehicle" (a Unimog fitted with video projectors, displays, a bubble for a DJ, and a sound system, which they claim is "the largest off-road sound system in the world"), and the shape and location shifting vehicles of the DI5ORIENT EXPRESS.




Photos by Kyle Hailey
Decompressions and Recompressions

The spirit of Burning Man is raised throughout the year in San Francisco at events such as the pre-Burn Flambé Lounge, the annual Decompression Street Fair, the How Weird Street Faire, the Sea of Dreams New Year's Eve events and numerous sound art camp fundraising events held between May and August every year. The Decompression events have become hugely popular multi-area dance parties, and attracting many who’ve never been to Burning Man. The San Francisco "Heat the Street Faire" Decompression party is a reprise of the Burn held on 8 city blocks two months after the event.
By 2007, there were Decompression events in various US cities including Los Angeles and New York, and international events such as those in London and Tokyo. There were even “pre-Decompression parties” like the one I attended in October 2007 at a warehouse at 1300 Potrero produced by Want It and Ambient Mafia (watch a video of the party here) and, of course a host of Decompression after-parties.

Kyle Hailey
This seemingly endless series of events provokes inquiries about the boundaries of Burning Man. When does the event terminate? When does it start? And for that matter, where is it? While the annual event transpires for a week from late August into September out beyond the small town of Gerlach-Empire in the Black Rock Desert, Nevada, its spatial and temporal boundaries are getting fuzzier. It might be stated that this was always the case. Historically the event has been a virtual imprint of San Francisco arts, technology and visionary cultures, its mutant-vehicular and theme-camped topos inscribed with emergent aesthetics and prevailing trends (such as the fairly belated Green Man theme of 2007), with remote experiments drifting back into the city proper, morphing the Bay area in often unseen and surprising ways. Indicative of scenes evolving within San Francisco, Burner fashion, body-mods, multimedia, performance arts, alterna-kit and desert punk filter back into what Burners call the “default” world. And so, to stay with my theme, the sounds and styles of Black Rock City are evident in San Francisco clublife at venues like 1015 Folsom, Sublounge and Mighty in SOMISSPRO or in art spaces like SomArts Cultural Center, Nimby and Cellspace along with parties in countless warehouse spaces. As Steven Jones makes clear in his San Francisco Bay Guardian article "Burner Season", Burning Man art and San Francisco club scenes “have merged and morphed, symbiotically feeding off one another to create something entirely new under the sun, a sort of code for the freaks who like to dress outrageously, dance madly, and be embraced for doing so.” As promoter Joegh Bullock explains, the term "Burner" has become “shorthand for a certain style of party”. One of the main sites of Burner sensibility has been Bullock’s Anon Salon. Referred to by Gosney as San Francisco’s “cyberdelic speakeasy”, from the early 1990s Anon Salon had hosted interactive, avant-garde, no–spectator style events reflective of cutting edge trends (such as the “New Edge Salon for Movers and Groovers”, Ambiotica), and buoyed by a camaraderie poorly grokked by non-Burners.

Residual Burn

New York city resident DJ Spooky recently (see film) referred to Burning Man as a context for "the prolonged present”. Out there, he stated, “the demarcation lines we’ve all been conditioned to accept dissolve… time blurs, you lose all of these strictures of New York, waking up, or going back to sleep, people, parties, events, blur, scenes blur, camps blur…” This is a common experience: playa life is an altered reality in which day and night, camping spaces, pounding rhythms, weird pants, strange laughter and familiar people, merge in the disorienting carnivalesque. Out on the playa, "now" is an extended experience seemingly lasting longer than most other "nows" in the lives of participants, generating a powerful compulsion amongst devoted Burners to relive the liminal experience of the playa over and again, year after year, often modifying and optimising the experience to suit their personal pleasures, dreams and visions. In making the return journey, pilgrims are not only revisiting the same place but are re-accessing the same time. But it is a "time" that is not so much a duration as a "time out of time", an "eternal presence" reminiscent of that explored by Roy Rappaport in those intensive ritual phases in which one experiences “the sheer successionless duration of the absolute changelessness of what recurs, the successionless duration of what is neither preceded nor succeeded, which is ‘neither coming nor passing away,’ but always was and always will be” (1999: 231). Awash with synchronized melodies and off-beat rhythms, under the rule of the sun and the heat of controlled burns, playing chicken with a fleet of motorized tarts, in the gaze of an androgenous BRC denizen with cyberdreads, in this “successionless duration”, “one returns", to revisit Rappaport, "ever again to what never changes”: playa time.

It may be a "place" out of time, but the prolonged presence of this place seems as fine and persistent as the white alkaline dust one carries home from the playa. Many Burners relate how the experience of Burning Man impacts their "default" existence, that their "pilgrimage" effects and shapes everyday life on the street, at work, in their homes, how they interact with others, how they raise their families, a theme considered in Lee Gilmore's ethnography, and by contributors to the book she co-edited (with Mark Van Proyen) Afterburn, and worthy of further research.