Edge Central> Graham St John

Photo: Sean Vassallo

This August, celebrating ten years since the original event, psytrance freaks swept into the field of dreams known as the Ozora Festival, the international psychedelic trance event in Hungary. The organisers and their friends know how to hold a party, with a great venue and production qualities satisfying the large numbers of participants descending on this green farm site near the town of Ozora a couple of hours out of Budapest, surely one of Europe’s most charming cities. It was one of the best psychedelic trance line-ups to date.


Over 15,000 freaks assembled to board the Ozora Mothership. But it wasn’t a smooth abduction. In fact, at the gate on Monday night, and well into the Tuesday morning, the event’s first night, the freaks were freaking out. And for good reason, as we were set an outrageous endurance test. On that night, emptied out of our rides, we faced a failed ticket verification system and an avoidable crush lasting for over 12 hours. Avoidable, since organisers knew 5000 had bought tickets and should have implemented an appropriate entrance strategy (and back up plan). Instead, the gate held all the appearances of the entrance to a refugee camp. As a wide river of ticket-holders were funnelled through the eye of needle (one ticket stall!) they were confronted with nothing short of massive incompetence - of the kind that some event industries can apparently walk away with since, as cynical minds aver, the goodwill of participants is being exploited.

Many other types of event would have seen rioting. With thousands corralled in a structure resembling a livestock race, we were like sheep edging towards the slaughterhouse. It was especially dispiriting for those like myself and my fellow travellers who had journeyed great distances from other continents. With the prospect of standing in the queue for over ten hours, many, like myself, were forced to buy another ticket so they could avoid the trauma. The ordeals of gate entry at large psytrance festivals have grown onerous in the last years. It might be said that ordeals are implicit to a pilgrimage or similar type experience, but this is a commercial event and those who are taking the money owe to ticket holders a responsible and humane entrance strategy (all this said, the ticketing agency Access All Areas refunded my ticket, and Amin from AAA writes to me that Ozora are determined not to ever repeat this situation).

It’s clear that the event line-up was Ozora’s main dedication. And who can complain about that. It was quite simply spectacular, giving cause for many black sheep to develop amnesia over the entrance trauma, and graze in the field of dreams over seven days - shuffling out to Liquid Soul, Vibrasphere, Echotek, Son Kite, Tristan, Hallucinogen, and Blue Planet Corporation among a litany of young and old hands: from Etnica, Total Eclipse, to Hyper Frequencies to Neuromotor and Martin Freeland (aka Man with No Name), who demolished the main floor with his killer final set.

MWNM by Bojan Bilic


Photo: P Ekman

The main stage, which took the appearance of a thatched hut, was located in a ampitheatre-like cove formed by green hills on three sides with the steepest and tallest at the back of the stage. The surrounding hills around offered perspective on the dance floor for many splayed out under shade structures or dancing under water spurting from post-top sprinklers positioned on an edge of the field. Dia KL
Photos P Ekman

Not open to camping, this sheltered arena was open to sheep shepherded by a donkey across the surrounding fields. The cove held a pagan-like appearance, with the circumference of the dance floor marked by a ring of giant dead trees “planted” in place. At the back of the dance floor there was a huge fire burning each night following the daily restocking. Photo by P. Ekman
And on the summit overlooking the stage at the far end of the field there stood two wicker-like figures formed from trees and frozen in dance, a DNA spiral positioned between them. And on the heights to the left of field a cornfield was the context for a labyrinth.

Valeria Castellano
Jan Szalkowski

Given that you had to negotiate Ozora’s main thoroughfare, a thin valley trail lined with psy-fashion boutiques and instant freak merchants, arriving at the main floor was like locating the supermarket in a mega-plex, where the goal can only be achieved once you’ve passed hundreds of specialist shops and distractions. This aspect was also a little disturbing – the pressures of fashion and “things” becoming too much for those bereft of the hat and the horse. Photo by P. Ekman
Perhaps it's due to the alternative pretentions of festivals like Ozora that such commoditising stands out for criticism. Many festival-goers have long sought the confines of these events as a safe harbour from the possessive power of commodities. Still, these were mostly small-scale traders and craft-sellers, and there was no advertising hoardings or brand campaigning on site. But it was most certainly worth one's while negotiating the last bend of the market alley, passing the chaishop and into Ozora cove, for you were broadsided by a superior audio-visual experience. The Ozora dance floor was a focal point unparalleled in many psytrance festivals where the energy is distributed across multiple stages. The only other key venue (besides a small cinema with sound system) was the Chill out tent, where the likes of Aes Dana, Chill in Berlin, Entheogenic, Vibrasphere and Ott performed in a noctilucent galaxy.

Alex604

Dia KL

The Chill featured quality sound production and became the venue for the after party which continued right through to midday Monday, with a renegade system running in a tepee down the valley. But the main stage was an extraordinary venue with a dedication to the psychedelic progression. That is, progressive electro trajectories during many of the days accept the last when a distinct progressive psychedelia held the day, from Prometheus at 3am, through Protoculture and onwards through Digicult, Blue Planet Corporation to Shane Gobi and Man With No Name (among others).

This Footage screened on local TV gives you a good idea of what was going down at Ozora.

Photo by P. Ekman

Totality Freaks and Shadow Dancing

Besides the gate fiasco, and the implicit problem with having one individual (namely the owner of the farmland at Ozora) capitalise on the experience, this was a memorable addition to a now ten-year tradition. The Solipse Festival, held on this site in 1999 with 20,000 people celebrating the total solar eclipse, was instrumental in the development of post-Goa trance culture (a compilation was released before that festival: Solipse - The Full Solar Eclipse Festival Compilation [1999]).
Star Sounds Orchestra at Solipse 1999 (Ozora)
Solipse 1999 @ Ozora

Etnica, who performed at that event, were called back for the 2009 anniversary along with many others who have played at Ozora over the years. Solipse 1999 was likely the most popular and formative event in psytrance at that time, cementing the association between psytrance and the total solar eclipse, the musical with the cosmic event. Though with different people participating in the event-organisation since the initial festival, each Ozora festival has carried the spirit of the initial experience, which for many participants holds a spiritual appeal. Other acts performing at Ozora 09, including Shpongle, Hallucinogen and Total Eclipse, have all had significant involvement with total solar eclipse event productions and performances. In this way, Ozora 09 was quite a retrospective, with Shpongle headlining in a live performance on Saturday night. Raja Ram and Simon Posford. Photos by Juan
With 12 performers on stage, it was a rare live performance from the act formed by Simon Posford and Raja Ram in the mid 1990s following their witnessing of a total solar eclipse in India in 1996 (an experience which gave life to their ethnodelic “…And the Day Turned to Night” (the closing epic on their debut Are You Shpongled?).

It’s possibly the only time when you’ll see people applauding the sky. The perfect yet brief marriage of the sun and moon. The spirit of totality birthing Ozora had been building for a few years prior to that event. By all accounts, the first “eclipse rave” was held near the coastal city of Arica at the edge of the Atacama desert, Chile, on November 2nd and 3rd 1994. Held in the immediate years of transition from Pinochet, that event was organised chiefly through a Chilean-German partnership, and was sponsored by outfitters Pash and filmed by MTV. The event featured Derrick May and for the first time in his homeland, Ricardo Villalobos.

Eclipse chasing has a long and interesting history that would inevitably merge with psychedelic culture. The experience of totality associated with a total eclipse of the sun, has historically been a cause for celebration and/or alarm, and interpreted according to local cosmological systems. Scientists have shown great interest in total solar eclipses since the eighteenth century but it was in 1836 that solar physicist Francis Bailey had founded the industry of eclipse chasing at the same time as generating fervor for solar physics. From that period populations were known to travel from locations outside the line of totality to view the spectacle, with multinational scientific expeditions mounted over the next century. Eclipse chasing would eventually become a recreational pursuit with the interventions of the Pedas-Sigler family of educators who, from the early 1970s, initiated eclipse tourism on board cruise ships. These entrepreneurs had, in fact, attempted to stage a rock festival (“Eclipse ‘70” in March 1970), in the line of the moon’s shadow in 1970 in a tiny fishing village in Suffolk, Virginia, called Eclipse (so named after a total eclipse there in 1900). But the proposed event was opposed by the townsfolk who condemned the potential “freak-out” on their turf only months after Woodstock. This might have been the greatest party that never happened. However, instead, on July 10 1972 they undertook their “Voyage to Darkness” cruise off the north Atlantic coast of Canada. Mixing science with sociality, it was beginning of a great adventure - they've been holding eclipse cruises ever since.

These eclipse tours demonstrated that it was not only subscribers to Sky and Telescope that were gravitating to remote regions where shadow bands race across the Earth. Since the early 1970s, the 100 mile wide shadow has drawn many into its path. Later maven of integrative medicine, Andrew Weil exemplified the psychonaut drawn to the marriage of the sun and the moon, the HierosGamos from which he would draw considerable psychocultural significance, as explained in his Marriage of the Sun and Moon: A Quest for Unity in Consciousness (Houghton Mifflin 1980: 222) where he describes his experience of an eclipse in Miahuatlán, Oaxaca, Mexico, in March 1970. But, with the failure of Ted Pedas to draw the eclipse into the orbit of the counterculture in that same year, and having aborted the dance music eclipse festival idea for lunar liner cruises, with the aid of cheaper travel, electronic music technologies and the Internet, it would take another 25-30 years for the dance music festal eclipse event to materialise.

By the late 1990s, as a cavalcade of spiritualists, astrologers and psychedelic big-game hunters found themselves in the playing fields of the HierosGamos, scientists and hippies found themselves proximate to one another in social spatio-temporal scenarios (ie parties) planned according to the alignment of celestial spheres at sites anticipated as optimum observation points on the line of totality. Curiously scientists and hippies would share a moniker – “freaks”, referencing the collision of travel, adventure and curiosity in a shared cosmic experience. But it would be the psytrance orientated festivals where, despite the growing presence of those determined to record the experience using photographic equipment, which accommodates those who implicitly recognise that a total solar eclipse is not merely a “cosmic event” to observe remotely, but a wild social experience in which one was immersed totally. Like a dozen turns of the New Year celebrated simultaneoulsy, the alignments would affect a licentious atmosphere among the crowds gathering in the totality.

So, as cosmic cowboys, prophets and prospectors joined the hunt, a whole new social event came into being as a highly specialised traveller phenomenon. Following the Eclipse Rave in Chile, Solar Eclipse Festivals subsequently attracted travellers to events in Siberia, Venezuela/Columbia, and South Asia in the late 1990s. There was another Solipse festival in June 2001 in South Africa and in early December 2002 there were festivals mounted on the path of totality near Lindhurst, South Australia (Outback Eclipse) and in South Africa. By that time, these events had accumulated a large following which was observed in 2006 at Soulclipse in Southern Turkey. Recently there have been smaller events in Siberia and Japan with another significant festal-cosmic event juncture planned for Easter Island in July 2010 with the Honu Eclipse and then beyond that, near Cairns, Australia, in November 2012.

House of Diversity

In his memoirs, the research scientist Francis Bailey wrote of his total eclipse experience in 1842 setting up his telescope inside a building at the university in Pavia Italy: “All I wanted was to be left alone during the whole time of the eclipse, being fully persuaded that nothing is so injurious to the making of accurate observations as the intrusion of unnecessary company” (in Weil p.60). Bailey was expressing a concern, common to the singular research scientist, yet remote from the experience of the eclipse festival, for while other humans may disrupt scientific measurements, in the immeasurable landscape of the vibe “company” is critical. And not just your close friends or family, but those others who have also journeyed from far and wide to celebrate the event. And it was this spirit of adventure and diversity - this cosmic vibe - that has carried through to the Ozora of the present, with participants arriving from a multitude of countries, and with the dance floor populated by those speaking many languages – sharing in the experience.

And let us not forget where this event, one of the premiere events in contemporary psytrance, is located: in space and time. Just prior to heading to Ozora I found myself attempting to recover from jetlag in Budapest, with the assistance of Botond Vitos, a local researcher of psytrance who graciously hosted me at his apartment a couple of streets from the Danube. On the day before heading to Ozora I found myself wandering around the House of Terror (Terror Háza).

More specifically, I found myself standing inside a room in a cellar of the building by this name, where hundreds of people had been murdered at the end of rope on a crude gallows. That device was itself the product of a crude system belonging to the Fascist and Communist regimes who cast their long shadow over Hungary post WWII. Special attention is devoted to the Hungarian Communist regime, one of the harshest dictatorships in Europe. The building is a haunting reminder of the dark manifestation. Both the Nazis and Communists established it as a háza of execution, an infamous house of horrors which operated until 1956, and re-opened in 2002 as a grizzly museum, a memorial to its many victims, and a reminder of the dark potentiality of humankind. One of the macabre aspects of the House of Terror is that it's situated on Andrássy Boulevard, one of Budapest’s main thoroughfares. Indeed you could walk inside the building and choke back on your double cheeseburger as you tour the basement where many hundreds of prominent and relatively unknown Hungarians (some political enemies, others in the wrong place at the wrong time) met unspeakable suffering, endured brutal interrogations and were led, if they survived these tortures, to a cold, miserable, end.



A decade after the end of Communism, two hours away, thousands of totality freaks were dancing in the shadow of the moon. It was a new kind of totality, the spirit of which was the polar opposite, if you will, to the tyranny of totalitarianism that had stifled life in the region following WWII. Ten years downstream from that event, I landed in the field of dreams. And, awash in a sound bath of languages – e.g. Hungarian, German, Russian, Italian, Swedish, Hebrew, Ukranian, French, Japanese, etc (and of course English of varying inflections) – I was reminded how psychedelic trance is a transnational home to diversity and is a symbol of hope. Jan Szalkowski Photo: P.Ekman



Many thanks to the photographers including Alex604, Bojan Bilic, Boris Voglar, Dia KL, P. Ekman, Jan Szalkowski, Juan, Sean Vassallo, and Valeria Castellano.

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.

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.

So what happens when banana time is snuk out at carnival's end? When elements of "the quick and the changeless" steal back to the "default" world? When impermanence gets an encore? Burning Man clearly leaves a compelling impression on its habitués many of whom reboot eternity the year round in a proliferation of Burn-inspired intercalary events. The event appears to be at the center of a burgeoning creative counter-cultural industry whose mission is to make now last longer, to enable one's "freak" to be more often set to "on", to facilitate the distribution of playa time across time and space. As the commitment to extending Burner artistic practices, ethos and identity beyond Burning Man possesses a reverse correspondence to that of "leaving no trace" on the playa, as the dedication to mobilizing Operation Enduring Freak appears to hold a strange equivalence to reducing MOOP ("Matter Out of Place") in the desert, Regional and other residual burns immolate the present across the continent and further afield. As announced at the official Burning Man webportal, "dozens of satellites orbit the Mother ship," with this cultural movement now encompassing "over sixty communities in seven countries, spread out over four continents."

As bike-saddled and begoggled Burners, drunk on playa time, in pink leathered chaps, pith helmets and home-made masks, ride the tall curling white-outs through the streets of San Francisco, as the Bakhtinian "second world" of the people floods the thoroughfares and habitats of the "first", as the remote cosmic life revives local lifestyle, it seems reasonable to assume that one's "social time", to again cite Rappaport, becomes enchanted by the ecstatic theater of "cosmic time". Research on the growing network of Burner tribes, and the accelerating frequency of Burn-inspired events, would shed light on this. The name for Vancouver's regional event, Recompression, might indicate something of the extended liminality desired. New York's Freak Factory, Santa Barbara's Clan Destino, or the network of virtual groups on tribe.net and Facebook et al. might illustrate what post-Burn liminalisation looks, sounds and is encoded like. And the name (along with the activities) of the extra-event disaster relief initiative Burners Without Borders may provide us with some insight on the borderless future.

But, amidst this accelerating and expanding presence, this prolongation of the prolonged present, what becomes of Burning Man, whose "spirit", like that of any "event", is its own ephemerality?


References

• Doherty, Brian. 2004. This is Burning Man: The Rise of a New American Underground. New York: Little, Brown and Company.
• Erik Davis. 2005. “Beyond Belief: The Cults of Burning Man”. In Lee Gilmore and Mark Van Proyen (eds). Afterburn: Reflections on Burning Man. Albuquerque: The University of New Mexico Press.
• Gilmore, Lee. 2006. “Desert Pilgrimage: Liminality, Transformation, and the Other at the Burning Man Festival”. In William H. Swatos, Jr (ed) On the Road to Being There: Studies in Pilgrimage and Tourism in Late Modernity, pp. 125-158. Leiden: Brill.
• Kozinets, Robert V. and John F. Sherry, Jr. 2004. “Dancing on Common Ground: Exploring the Sacred at Burning Man.” In Graham St John (ed), Rave Culture and Religion, pp. 287-303. New York and London: Routledge.
  
• Rappaport, Roy. 1999. Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Thanks to Scott London, Kyle Hailey, Landon Elmore, Michael Gosney, Steve Fritz, CCC, Leo Nash, Mickey and Tristan Savatier for the beautiful images reproduced here. More of Kyle Hailey's images at the following: Burning Man 2007, Beautiful People from the Future and West Coast Dance.

Photos by Kyle Hailey.

Having disembarked from a four month odyssey across the event horizon, San Francisco's annual Burning Man "Decompression" party, the Heat the Street Faire at 19th and Minnesota, provoked the opening and release of these compressed data-packets.

Back in July I lamented my rather forlorn quest for the Dionysian Spirit in the land of its origin. While he remained elusive on Greece’s “Island of Fire”, I discovered Dionysus piped into domesticated domains regulated by tourism, music and mobile telecommunications industries.

A few months later, I would be swimming in it in Israeli psytrance—a curious circumstance in the light of the ongoing crisis in the Middle East. Writing the piece “Dionysus in Zion” in Azure way back in 2000, Assaf Sagiv noted that, following centuries of dormancy, the Bacchanalia have “returned with an intensity unknown since the end of the classical period.” Moreover, while this “new culture of ecstasy” and “pagan intoxication” would be “resurrected” throughout the 1990s in worldwide electronic dance formations, as an embattled “hothouse of permissiveness in the conservative Middle East”, Israel would become the vital center of this new international movement. As Sagiv continued, “the ancient fertility cults which the zealous followers of the Hebrew God sought to extirpate three thousand years ago have come to life again in the land of Israel.”

Progressive vs Full On

The Neo-Dionysian Spirit in Zion was to envelop me at The 3rd Empire’s TAZ Festival held from September 26-28 during the holiday of Sukkot.

Photo by Yuda Braun
In its second year, the TAZ was held near Arad on the edge of the Negev close to the Occupied Territories. I traveled there from Mitzpe Ramon with Yoni and Max of minimal progressive outfit AKD (who would play a live set and are due to release their second CD in a couple of months). As an interactive psymphonie with a host of local and international maestros conducting the currents through which 1500-2000 participants rafted wild-style for 3-4 days, the TAZ holds ground at the progressive psychedelic edge of the crowded Israeli trance calendar. The event attracts partisans of a diverse alternative milieu, sound experimentalists, surfers of the mind, body and spirit negotiating progressive psychedelic swells within the oceans of international trance (represented at the TAZ by the likes of Atmos, Ace Ventura, D-Nox, James Munro, Perfect Stranger, Aerospace and Gaby 2B). Although this event was predominantly “progressive” (and thus hosting music usually between 135-145 bpm) it wasn’t purely so. As has become common to open-air trance events, faster and more deranged tempos—regarded in Israel as “full on”—reverberated through nocturnal hours before sunrise and daylight DJ and live sets combining progressive minimalism with complex psychedelic structures: the distinctive sounds of progressive psychedelic.
Photo by Joshua Schmidt
The style-skewing would be reversed at the other major psytrance event held in the country over the same weekend: Shagaat’s Morrison Drops Festival on the Dead Sea (which I did not attend). Besides stating that the Dead Sea is “the lowest place on earth”, the promotional literature conveys that the event was held in honor of Jim Morrison, often, intriguingly enough, compared favorably with Dionysus. Rather idolised as “the one that has started it all”, the event organizers not only identify with a psychedelic lineage, but have apparently located its divine source and authority in the American 1960s. A page of the festival information booklet even featured the entire lyrics to Morrison’s “Scream of the Butterfly”, after which this edition of the festival was named. Enabling its participants the potential to reach astounding heights at the lowest place on the planet, the event featured a predominately “full on” main stage and a less popular “progressive” stage. Identified with the likes of Astrix, GMS, Talamasca, Maximum (formerly Serious Isness), and Xerox (the last two performing at Morrison Drops) and with labels like BNE and HOM-mega, and with fans typecasting the music (and themselves) as “serious” and “hard” (not, therefore, “cheesy” or “emotional”), “full on” features a tempo often paced between 145-150 bpm and a preference for heavy “psytars” (synthesized electric guitar riffs). As one enthusiast put it: “It’s a ride with 100 jet thrusters. Hyper to the max and even scary at times”.

Nothing is certain in the world of psytrance, especially when enthusiasts are given the opportunity to shape their music-loving identities within the context of festivals with multiple stages and styles—often migrating between style camps inside these sonicities. While techno-tribalists may eventually identify with a more or less distinctive aesthetic, their favored artists (producers and DJs) often make infuriatingly brisk style transitions, even altering their name or adopting multiple handles to reflect the movement. Clicking around on www.discogs.com reveals how psytrance artists commonly alter their professional identities, sometimes moderately, othertimes absolutely, signifying a reconditioning of their personal style. Additionally, labels will appear, disappear, and re-brand at the drop of a synthesized high hat. Recognising variant audience preferences and demands in different parts of the globe, and as a testament to the universe of shifting aesthetics within which they travel, program, and spin, some artists will produce, release, and perform under multiple monikers simultaneously, often holding membership in numerous outfits. Simon Posford, aka Hallucinogen, and also a member of Shpongle, Younger Brother, and, throughout his career, nearly 30 other acts with which he’s been a member or contributor, is only the most well known example.

These developments are replicated within other EDM genres. By contrast with the managed multi-member band format associated with other popular musics, with the commonly self-managed one (or two) person electronic act, such transformations and combinations are far easier to achieve and maintain. Rapid developments in digital audio software, virtual instrumentation and home studios (along with their accessibility) factor into these trends. But perhaps psytrance is the EDM genre more likely to accommodate such chameleon-like hyper-artistry. After all, it has become the most culturally and stylistically diverse dance music scene globally. With successful acts performing in hundreds of locations within dozens of countries around the world annually, artists are exposed to a torrent of fresh sounds. No wonder artists frequently evade specific stylistic signifiers under which they may be pinned, and music labels so often diversify.

Adding to this commotion, “full on” and “progressive” are not distinct. Lets investigate common terminology adopted by enthusiasts to distinguish themselves from others. While followers of “full on” self-identify as “serious”, as “harder”, more uncompromising, and indeed full on, than other trance enthusiasts, the music triggering tumultuous karahana, and the vibe echoing an outlaw, we can take it, sensibility; “progressive” enthusiasts name-check as sophisticated aesthetes, with spatialised sound structures affecting an uplifted consciousness, and the vibe ostensibly built around intentionally spiritual, visionary and ecological factors. While the former vibe is a context for maximum energy expenditure, with artists engineering an unrestrained dance frenzy, the latter hosts a rapture enabled by the refinement native to a progressive ethos, a measured concern for the journey and its outcomes, with audio and visual engineers orchestrating the slow, restrained release of the “passional” via a series of controlled detonations. In “full on”, we find an opening up of borders approximating the inclusive abandonment of the Dionysian in which males and females of different classes and ethnic groups might experience the obliteration of their separate selves. In “progressive”, a preoccupation with “disconnecting from Babylon” (as TAZ organiser Boris indicated to me), an experimentation with values and practices alternative to those predominant. Both evince desirable freedoms: one committed to the extinguishment of difference, apparently unconcerned about what transpires after the orgy; the other guided by a commitment to novelty and the charting of difference.

In my experience, these descriptions, countervailing concerns and tensions hold weight. Yet both musics, habitués, and vibes can be uncompromising and sophisticated, consciousness dissolving and consciousness raising, lawless and ethical, orgiastic and restrained, ecstatic and visionary. That is, either style is inflected by modes of abandonment and sophistication on the part of artists and enthusiasts, especially within the increasingly common cross-genred dance festival environment. The cross-fading of wildness and deliberation was identified by Erik Davis who offered an engaging account of “spiritual hedonism” percolating within the nascent scene in Goa (in his article “Hedonic Tantra”), a dynamic which Joshua Schmidt, in his MA thesis “Fused by Paradox”, observes at Israeli psytrance mesibot (parties) where it is often apparent that “bacchanalian revelers will encounter sublimely meditative moments or contemplative Transistim [trancers] will exchange their serious demeanor with acts of wild intemperance” (p. 19). It is the nature of genres, upon closer reflection, to elude definition and to reveal exceptions especially when they derive from a common root: the psychedelic trance of “Goa-trance” (and its various derivatives). And given the existence of other subgenres like “ambient”, freeform “suomisaundi” from Finland and Russian “darkpsy” or “psycore”, and determined efforts to fuse existing sound rubrics in the quest for originality—in the sense of both a return to an origin and the production of a new sound—the vibrant soundscapes of psytrance are rather complicated indeed.

A TAZ Too Far?

It appears that The 3rd Empire recognize this cross-vibrancy, which is possibly revealed in the name of their annual open-air event. As mentioned in my previous post, the event is called Temporary Autonomic Zone (not Temporary Autonomous Zone, after Bey’s seminal tract). Speaking to me following his set on the second day of the event, Boris informed me that this acronymic shift was intentional (or at least it wasn’t a spelling mistake). Just what was intended can only be inferred since he provided few details. Rather than loosely identify with anarchism or autonomism, perhaps the outfit are declaring their identification with an automatic/machinic sensibility, the event name evoking participants within a compulsive sub-bass-culture treading the program loop. Perhaps the “autonomic” identification permits habitués to dodge the polemics of the likes of Murray Bookchin who, in his “Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism: An Unbridgeable Chasm”, scorned Bey’s TAZ as a repository for “lifestyle anarchism”, lamenting the downgrading of anarchist rebellion into a narcissistic “bourgeois deception”. Perhaps it is also a distancing from the philosopher of Sufism and radical Islam who, in his Millennium, provocatively advocated “the greater jihad”, a revolutionary response—comprised of a multitude of “lesser jihad”and more permanent zones of autonomy—to the fall of Soviet communism and the triumph of Capital. But one cannot help notice the concern for “Peace in the Middle East” (i.e. the stickered signs worn by some dance floor participants) within a context in which Israeli Muslims and Arabs (including the Bedouin) are not invited to the party.
Photo by Yuda Braun
Photo by Carew

And thus one recognizes that the revolutionary will to triumph over “separation” fuelling Bey’s post-Soviet project, may be wanting within a culture which samples the mythos of PLUR (Peace Love Unity Respect) over a stripped-back bass-line bereft of politically progressive substance.

There is certainly no shortage of ethnic diversity among Israeli trance enthusiasts, Transistim consisting of descendents of those “returning” from a scattered world-wide diaspora. But the idealism remains muted within contexts which reproduce prejudice and elitism found within the broader society, and whose exclusion of ethnic “undesirables” appears requisite to a distinct—“progressive”—vibe. Schmidt observes (2006: 56) that middle-class Ashkenazim—who often identify themselves as Anashim Yafim (“beautiful/nice people”), or Anashim Exuti’im (“quality people”)—are in a position to exclude those inconsistent with such ethnic-orientated identifications. Most pointedly, these include the often lower-class Eidot Ha’mizrax or Jews of North African or Middle Eastern descent, who are often identified as Shimonim, and derided as Arsim. As Schmidt clarifies, "'Arse' is an Arabic word which literally means ‘pimp’ and in Israeli slang implies ‘a jerk’”. As a term which is applicable to anyone acting foolishly or disrespectfully towards others (especially males towards females), almost by definition it means acting like an Arab or mizraxi jerk. Populated by a significant proportion of middle-class Transistim (i.e. by those agents of a “progressive” sensibility whose preoccupations with the expression of difference from dominant norms by necessity excludes those who might jeopardize this vibe), the TAZ appeared to accommodate few Arsim, and no Shimonim. This said, it should also be noted that, possessing a nascent ecological ethos, the TAZ Festival is a vibe that is not simply conditioned towards self-reproduction.

Neotrance and Freak Ritual

Recently I’ve been contemplating the nature of trance within psytrance, sifting, rather inevitably, through the characteristics of a complex movement. In my understanding neotrance is a dance cultural phenomenon possessing tendencies towards both the dissolution and performance of the self. It betrays the ecstatic surrender of the ego to the rhythm and dance floor at the one extreme and the performance of the self within a theatre of dance at the other. In its festal moments, which are indeed its primary moments, psytrance contextualizes the sacrificial dismemberment of identity through excess and abandonment, and/or its creative reconstitution through performance, gesture, and style. On the one hand, self-annihilation (transgression), on the other self-exaltation (a kind of progression if you will).

The “tribal” trope common within psytrance culture may actually denote both tendencies: an inclusive sensibility where distinctions are obliterated within the temporary dance conflagration (an experience regarded as the “tribe”); or the magnification of difference spectacularised within the precincts of the dancescape (my “tribe”, your “tribe”, etc). While such “tribal” configurations may be apparent within other contemporary dance-oriented music cultures (psytrance does not hold a monopoly on the trance experience), the dynamic appears particularly vivid and extreme within psytrance. And while the tendencies may be apparent within traditional trance forms, the flourishing of ecstasis and theatre within global electronic dance music carnivals suggests that we are looking at a different order and type of experience. Here we find “trance” amplified within the indeterminate atmosphere of the carnival, which, after all, has traditionally offered its occupants these contrasting and complementary routes—self-dissolution and spectacularisation—the availability of which is now conditioned and enhanced by new technologies of the senses.

Unlike the generally domesticated carnival of the present, the psytrance festal, the mesibot, is typically feral. I used the word extreme above with particular purpose. Those who camp under the banners of neotrance, like those of The 3rd Empire’s TAZ Festival, pursue extreme experiences—what I call radical self-edgework. Within psytrance, the assemblage of remote location, psychoactive compounds, body modifications, costumes, sound, lights and sustained dancing with other participants potentiates the re-formulation of identity.













The “edge” that is “worked” is perhaps more accurately a line on a continuum between extremes characterised by self-annihilation and transcendence on the one hand and performative self-spectacularisation on the other. And to work with these extremes is to play with risk. These are the combined risks and dangers associated with travelling to and dwelling in exotic or remote sites, radical states of un/dress, piercings, tattoos, hair styles and other feralia, consuming multiple illicit compounds, experimenting with novel sound aesthetics, unusual modes of public intimacy, spectacular feats of endurance on the dance floor, and attempts to evade or outwit police. Variously ritualised, the entire assemblage facilitates the re-fashioning of identity, most powerfully marked at those limits where rules, codes and laws, of propriety, morality and the state are transgressed. Possessing a significant gravitational influence, these transgessive limits are potent thresholds frequented and even dwelt upon by participants. Since personal empowerment, social status and group belonging are at stake, neotrancers will make substantial investments of their time, resources and energy in regaining and sustaining these sites, states and conditions of risk.

Photo by Omer
The extreme dance floor found beyond conventional standards of embodiment, modes of communication and states of consciousness, is a quintessential freakscape. Appearing throughout countercultural history, the freak is never straight, stationary or complete, but liminal and entirely ambiguous with regard to moral rules, dress codes, gender regulations, disciplined embodiment and acceptable mind states. Related to the bohemian, the artist, the musician, the addict, the queer, the anarchist, the rebel, the clown, the hacker, the gypsy, the nomad, the exotic, the freak transgresses categories, trespasses psychic limits, seeks forbidden knowledge, mixes traditions and drifts between marginal sites. Laboratories of radical freakiness flourishing in Israel, experimental theatres of dance are of particular interest to us given the nation’s historical and cultural experience.


Psywarriors

Freak rituals proliferate within a Dionysian revival, which has seen Israeli psytrance culture gain prominence within an international trance movement. Their performance need to be understood within the context of tragic historical and cultural circumstances. In Sagiv's lament “pessimism, passivity and disengagement from everyday life have become the most prominent features of Israeli youth, who prefer to lose themselves in psychedelic festivals rather than come to terms directly with the complex realities of personal and public life in a country in conflict”. Sagiv is of course referring to the pressure-cooker environment in which Israelis are raised: the decades of violence resulting from the emergence of the state of Israel in 1948, the occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, the al-Aqsa Intifada (or second Palestinian uprising) from 2000, ongoing tensions with Syria, Hamas suicide bombers, official paranoia, international condemnation, etc. The mandatory three year service in the IDF (Israeli Defense Forces) and the permanent state of readiness, evinced, for example, by the “Second Lebanon War” which broke out in July 2006 and lasted for five weeks following the kidnapping of Israeli soldiers by Hamas and Hezbollah and the shelling of settlements on the northern border, renders “growing up” within Israel a stressful experience with which young adults in other liberal democracies are rarely familiar. The stresses are accompanied by feelings of impotence and a corresponding sense of anguish. It is this tragic condition which Sagiv argues has stimulated a Dionysian impulse apparently more authentic and thorough than 1960s precursors since the idealistic parameters of the latter are largely absent in Israel.

In a real sense, risky self-marginalisation constitutes a response to the crisis of the everyday within Israel, with investments in psytrance incited by a smoldering dissatisfaction among youth, by the pressures of dutiful citizenship, fellowship among “the Chosen people”, the burden of sacrificial mythologies. In an age of globalized media, Transistim have responded to the absence of the kinds of freedoms understood to be enjoyed by youth elsewhere. A typically non-vocal dance culture - yet a vociferous and audacious reaction to freedoms denied.

Certainly, militarism has had a critical role in the headlong rush toward the ecstatic abandonment of the self. When young Israelis stumbled into nascent bohemian electronic trance scenes in Goa and Thailand in the late 1980s and early 1990s, many were travelers who had recently completed their military duties. While backpacking around the world has become a post-service practice encouraged by the state, the “horizontal” and “vertical” “trips” (following Anthony D’Andrea’s characterization) sought by travellers could hardly have been anticipated by authorities. In Goa and other exotic locations at an extreme “horizontal” (geographical) remove from the Holy Land, those Schmidt characterizes as “uninhibited psychonautic trailblazers” (2006: 11) could undertake “vertical” flights: with the assistance of charas, LSD, Ecstasy, and psilocybin, perhaps washed down with Qat. In remote sites, removed from social, religious, and military obligations, psychonauts would enter other holy-lands, accessing regions perhaps more approximate to the sensation of awe, characterized as the “numinous” and explored by Rudolf Otto in The Idea of the Holy. Yet here, the “war machine”—which Georges Dumezil identified as an experience of “puissance” falling in-between and outside the operations of the state, an idea of undisciplined itinerancy informing Deleuze and Guattari’s “nomadology”—would become a mobilizing force. Having participated in the IDF, Transistim were now conscripts in the legions of the night, and up for some daring-do. Raising independent banners, developing “nomad science” and never surrendering, these itinerant braves of chillum, decks and hubris would mobilize efforts to unite all under a fierce rhythm.

Sagiv suggests that “conventional wisdom holds that the army matures the young Israeli, but the truth may well be the opposite: In many respects, the military framework forces upon the young Israeli just about all the discipline, order and duty he can handle. Once he escapes into civilian life, he feels an immense need for release, an overwhelming desire to “let go.” At times, one gets the impression that the typical freshly discharged soldier views his new civilian status not as representative of new obligations, but as a license for anarchy.” Once discharged from the military, duty and discipline appear to have been supplanted with reckless experiments upon the self, immersion in pounding bass and exposure to multiple consciousness alterants. Yet, military training appears to have equipped wayfarers for these new campaigns. With many young veterans of combat units and other hazards joining the transnational hippie multitudes in Goa, Israeli travellers would earn a reputation for displaying an unusual commitment to the extremes of electronic trance: sometimes with an aggressive determination.

Assembling for regular incursions across the Line of Predictability, soldiering on to the morning light, these decorated partisans were pulling together in a bizarre inflation of their militarized backgrounds. Out there, the sacrifice of the individual to the national cause appears to have been substituted, at least temporarily, by a sacrifice of the separate self in consumptive extremes: heroic doses, shared risks, feats of endurance and other transgressions critical to a sense of camaraderie analogous to their experience in the service. The potent trance sublime, a shared gambol with the Other, replete with the potential for ascension and derailment, reminiscent for me of those who have half-jokingly referred to themselves as members of the PLA (the Psychedelic League of Australasia). So while it may have been a process of “getting fucked-up”, these fanatics of the sublime were in it together. This is, in part, what Schmidt means by “hallucinatory communitas”: the total militarized experience within contemporary Israel matched by a “full on” corporate psychedelicized experience, undisciplined yet commensurate in its intensity.

Leaving behind one’s weapons in the daily struggle for visibility, certainty and security, psychonauts were becoming loyal to a new cause: surprise, disorientation and uncertainty. Replacing tools of death and terror for those of peace and pleasure, their commitment is undertaken within the context of the hijacking of technology and techniques of war (commonly associated with the Apollonian) for ecstatic causes. As Simon Reynolds observed in Ecstasy Generation, while Nietzche opposed science and technical knowledge to “the orgiastic spirit of Dionysian art”, in dance cultures “the Dionysian paroxysm becomes part of the program, regularized, looped for infinity”.


And it appears likely that these fearless commitments to indeterminacy through intoxication, hallucination, and the chaos-dance of karahana, trigger renewed efforts by the state to secure its borders, with boundary-defying trance justifying the deployment of police resources, blanket surveillance strategies and the fashioning of “architectures of control” in the age of the tragic security-roundabout where even laughter is deemed a security risk: see Wolfgang Sutzl’s recent article in CTheory: “Tragic Extremes: Nietzsche and the Politics of Security".

Photo by Yuda Braun

A Passport to Zionysus

Becoming expatriots with footholds inland from beach-heads established around the world, an unknown proportion of Israelis would not return from these missions abroad. But, having turned over the engines of entrancement time and again, with the keys to the “war machine” in hand, veterans smuggled their machines back across the border where they sought to reproduce and optimize the exotic atmospherics of Goa and Ibiza on the beaches, and in the desert and clubs of Israel, all year round. By the mid to late 1990s, promoters were enabling experienced veterans and raw recruits to return, over and over, to the scene of the sublime.

And while these new warriors of trance strategized to reproduce the experience in the face of media panics, state repression and police intervention, psytrance music would become so predominant that in 2007 I could detect it everywhere: from pleasure craft on the Red Sea and apartment buildings in Mitzpe Ramon to supermarkets and passing cars in Jerusalem, a permissive carnival of the everyday, and a burgeoning trance music industry, kept secure by the IDF, an unofficial arsenal of weapons of mass destruction, and regional military supremacy.



Mirroring processes world-wide, moral panics lubricate the mechanisms through which domesticated aesthetics come into being, stealthily creating the licensed outlaw, its agents probable midwives to the success of the likes of Infected Mushroom who were celebrated in the May 2007 DJMag cover story as “the only true mega-stars of psy-trance”.



Yet, despite commercial ubiquity, unlicensed mesibot transpire all year round in Israel, with events often held in remote regions of the Negev. And, persistent in their efforts to replicate the exotic trance-sublime within Israel, adopting levels of production difficult to sustain in the absence of appropriate permissions, techno-tribes like Doof, Shagaat, and The 3rd Empire, enter into notoriously fragile relationships with police.

Enabling Israelis to continue to take flight into the psychedelic frontiers while remaining a short drive away from Tel-Aviv, Jerusalem and the next working-week, for the recent TAZ festival, The 3rd Empire issued trance-travelers with information booklets in the fashion of a passport, complete with stamped daily “visas”.
















Squatting Liminality

As such domestic flights were initiated with increasingly shorter intervals from the mid 1990s, and as young Israelis were amassing psychedelic frequent flier points without leaving the country, cultural critics became apprehensive of youth malaise and disenchantment: for instance, Gadi Taub’s 1997 book, A Dispirited Rebellion: Essays on Contemporary Israeli Culture. Likewise, at the turn of the millennium, Assaf Sagiv worried about a dispirited and directionless youth. The absence of idealism may be an appropriate concern. After all, the reflexive, visionary, current within western counterculture, and manifest in psytrance scenes in countries like Australia, Portugal, United States, and the UK, appears to have only had a very marginal presence in Israel. Israeli psytrance scenes seem to accommodate a desire to be suspended in a world in-between, which is, at the same time, a world outside. And so, while mesibot are temporary and fleeting, inhabitants seek residencies on the threshold. Squatting the liminal with accelerated frequency, autonomic beatfreaks appear to defer what Arnold van Gennep called agrégation, becoming precarious habitués of these "tribal" encampments.

This might be a favored condition for a people whose identity has been shaped historically through self-exile. The popular open-air Israeli psytrance mesibot may even fashion an enduring vibe of the exiles, but as an exodus without a clear purpose or destination, perhaps it is, following Deleuze and Guattari, a site for “warriors without a strategy”, for nomads who don’t move, youth disinclined to orthodox maturation. If so, such off-worlds resemble the ludic outlands of the rave emergent within the contexts of Thatcher and Reagan, the UV-reactivated playpens of which would host giant water pistols, bubble blowers, juggling and balancing toys, lollypops, and Ecstasy, with participants achieving extreme states of abandonment in popular womb-like realms common to cultures valorizing immediacy, immortality, and youthfulness. These transitional worlds without telos, incomplete rituals for “24 hour party people”, find a special manifestation in psytrance which retains enthusiasts to an age considerably higher than other dance cultures. The average age of participants in psytrance festivals is probably mid to late twenties, with many people in their 30s, 40s and 50s (i.e. much higher than other genres).


Photo by Omer

From the borderlands of the Occupied Territories, to the beaches of the Mediterranean, to night clubs in Tel-Aviv, the routinisation of the psytrance aesthetic across Israel may be indicative of the normalizing of ecstatic encounters Victor Turner had called “normative communitas”—encounters which various interested parties seek to legitimate through symbolic, discursive, and ideological frameworks. A Holy Rave anyone? But since incompleteness is native to the party, as promoters and punters return to the vibe, perennially restoring and modifying its properties, Turner’s processual lens—which hinges on the resolution and certainty achieved through dissolution and indeterminacy; redress through periods of crisis and conflict—may not be an altogether precise heuristic. While some scholars seek to understand participation in electronic dance music cultures as a rite de passage enabling transition from “preliminal” to “postliminal” conditions, and popular discourse credits an efficacy to dance events reckoned as sites for self-transcendence, social transformation, and/or the transmission of values, given that participants revisit and update the dancescape on a regular basis, refreshing and optimizing its freak parameters, weighing anchor in a field of impermanence, liminalising their lifeworlds indefinitely, new models are desired.

Freaks in the Holy Land

The kernel of such a model is located in the processual husk: after all, in his most well known essay on the subject, “Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Period in Rites de Passage”, Turner suggested that liminality is a “realm of pure possibility” opening digressions upon a deluge of modern performance arts. But the “realm” here is invariably a threshold, a portal, a stage. It may be characterized by indeterminacy, especially within the voluntary, experimental, and fragmentary realm of what Turner called the “liminoidal”, but given the structure and function of the process—be it ritual, theatre, game, literature, or otherwise—an outcome is implicit to the programme: a transit, a finale, a result, a conclusion, etc. But with the trance-freak there may be no transit anticipated, no outcome desired, for freakiness possesses a logic which desires nothing more than its own reproduction (the motives of those who will appropriate this “logic” for their own ends notwithstanding). As such, the freak is the embodiment of the carnivalesque, an interiorizing of what Bakhtin called the “second world” of the carnival, the appropriation of the Dionysian as lifestyle, practices at once enhanced and regulated by capital and state.

Debated endlessly within cultural studies, "carnival" has thus been interpreted as an artificial revolution, an insubstantial “ritual of rebellion” to cite Max Gluckman. Is the sartorialised concern for “Peace In The Middle East” among some TAZ occupants, a kind of liminalised fantasy which ultimately—to paraphrase Terry Eagleton—ensures the maintenance of structures of privilege? Or is something important at stake within a carnivalesque transpiring, most pointedly, within a militarized zone? While moral authorities and cultural critics complain that Israeli psytrance is little more that a directionless escapade from responsibility and change, collapsing even under the weight of its own contradictions, others aren’t so damning. Becoming “fed up with occupation and all the ‘isms’”, Daniel Belasco (in his article “Land of the Rave”) suggests young Israelis “have turned to trance raves “for a new consciousness that envisions peace with neighbors and celebrates the value of the individual. Raves in Israel send a powerful message. In a nation so conflicted and militarized, the longing for “PLUR” is far more political than in the United States, which enshrined the pursuit of happiness in its founding document.”

While carnivals may become moments of sanctioned transgression, as Stallybrass and White argued in their Politics and Poetics of Transgression, the carnival is essentially ambivalent, indeed polyvalent, its inherent contradictions a perennial source of potentiality, of cultural becoming. As such, the carnival—and, therefore, the freak—constitutes a metacultural toolkit, a congested superstore of possibilities, a difference engine. And, moreover, the repression, normalization, or expropriation of the carnivalesque provide inspiration for novel and transgressive movements. Both Turner’s historical understanding of the spontaneous gush of “communitas” which may follow a period of “normative communitas”, or the “instituant” forms which Roger Bastide argued are responsive to religious institutionalization, appear to acknowledge this.

The contemporary flourishing of psytrance thus carries an aspect of the Dionysian so often neglected, and sometimes even feared, by critics: the element of surprise. Borrowing from Terence McKenna, Dionysian engines are novelty machines. The sacrifice is potent, freaks are on the threshold, and poetry is in the making: circumstances which should be valued in themselves without capitulating to structuralist or functionalist approaches. Belasco reckons that the allure of psytrance among Israelis is a “longing for cultural and spiritual unity” with others, and therein an aspiration to “overcome the particularism of being a member of ‘the Chosen People’”. If this does indeed provide a motivation for this culture’s unusual flourishing in Israel, there's little surprise that it has become a hub of controversy: e.g. as a source of moral panic, an emancipatory cause, a hypocritical pursuit. While it may be unfair to expect more from the freakscape within a country whose countercultural history differs markedly from that found elsewhere, Daniel Belasco’s inquiry remains apposite: “what will save and preserve Israel, adherence to an invisible God, the political expediency of the state, or the human necessity of pleasure? An Israeli rave is an ephemeral utopia, the wellspring of dreams, and, as a poet wrote [Delmore Schwartz] in the dark year 1937, ‘in dreams begin responsibilities.’”


Photo by Carew
Photo by Yuda Braun

Had I miss-keyed the url?

I make a few efforts at re-loading the page. All futile, for the website has been pulled under a week from the event's conclusion. The virtual blinds now drawn tight. What was formerly breathtaking and bombastic, now among the virtually disappeared; consigned, unceremoniously, to the afternet. I got to thinking, was this an effort to induce popular amnesia? Could the experience be exorcised from collective memory? In those endless minutes contemplating the failure of my hypertext document requests I indeed wondered if IT really happened at all. Had I actually attended the Holy Rave in the south of Israel?

It’s not going to be easy to explain this, but good thing I made a partial data back up.

For years I have wanted to travel to Israel, widely recognised as a “trance power” and possibly the only country where psytrance is a “popular” music.

So it was early September and I’d landed in Tel Aviv, and ,recovering from a fall from the roof of the headquarters of Mushy Records in Jerusalem, I travelled to Mitzpe Ramon in the southern Negev on the edge of the spectacular Ramon Crater (locally referred to as the Maxtesh Ramon) where I’ve been hosted by Joshua Schmidt (aka Shuki Shalev) and his Japanese wife Sayaka.






















Joshua is an anthropology PhD student at Ben Gurion University of the Negev conducting research on Israeli psytrance culture (and its enthusiasts, or “Transistim”) having already produced a couple of insightful short ethnographic films on the Israeli psytrance scene, films he has presented at the last two International Association for the Study of Popular Music Conferences in Rome and Mexico City.

One of Joshua’s key points is that Israeli psytrance is pervaded with and indeed, fused by, paradox. Based on years of research and personal experience within the prodigious Israeli electronic trance music scene, his MA thesis (completed last year) explored a series of dichotomies he sees prevailing within the culture which he says is, in part, a vehicle for prejudice and exclusivity, and which “actually simulates mainstream behavioral values and models." This might be a genuine surprise to Israeli authorities contending with a youth culture whose Dionysian excesses are, for many, a subject of grave concern.

This kind of project opens a window on the complex and contradictory character of counterculture, which has been recently addressed in various ways in research on electronic trance cultures. Notably, in Psychedelic White: Goa Trance and the Viscosity of Race, Arun Saldanha conveys racial segregation within Goa-trance parties in Anjuna, India, a "rave tourism" experience which he claims “consolidates whiteness.” Also, how new digital religions and visionary arts cultures are deeply implicated in the global flows of flexible capitalism is explored in Anthony D’Andrea’s recent book Global Nomads: Techno and New Age as Transnational Countercultures.

The compatibility with, and/or reproduction of, dominant practices and patterns, is not uncommon to movements with “alternative” pretensions. Take for example Burning Man. There’s been a great deal of discussion recently about apparent contradictions within the precincts of Black Rock City, the annual home of the Burning Man Festival in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert. The complaint that Burning Man has collapsed under the weight of its own hypocrisy was an apparent rationale behind the premature torching of the event’s eponymous figure at its most recent edition. For insightful commentary on the status of Burning Man as a countercultural community see entries on Rob Kozinets’ blog Brandthroposophy. Lee Gilmore’s extensive ethnographic research of the phenomenon demonstrates how class and status differences are reproduced at Burning Man, a temporary desert city importing and replicating civic infrastructure and urban comforts (I wait like a slavering dog for Lee’s forthcoming book and DVD on Burning Man). Shifting our trowels deeper through the fine-layered detritus left by the interactions between the “underground” and the “mainstream” we uncover a very complex phenomenon. The appropriation of cybernetic discourse from the “military-academic-industrial triangle” by mavericks in the Whole Earth network retooling technologies for a better world (as documented by Fred Turner in his recent From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism) perfectly illustrates this complexity.

Perhaps Israeli psytrance, along with electronic trance cultures elsewhere, are repurposing, rewiring and remastering certain countercultural traditions for their own ends. Take for instance the popular Israeli event TAZ, initiated last year by The 3rd Empire and this year featuring a strong international line-up and an ecological ethos rare within the Israeli scene. Their acronym is “Temporary Autonomic Zone”. Read that back again. Surely this is not a simple misspelling of “autonomous”, the word central to Hakim Bey’s Temporary Autonomous Zone, a seminal tract that has long been debated within alternative formations world-wide, providing the conceptual architecture for manifold events. Organisers of this commercial (and thus questionably autonomous) festival appear to be declaring their identification with an automatic/machinic sensibility, the acronymic shift perhaps indicative of a desired capitulation to spontaneity and impulsiveness, an autonomic response to relentless electronic sound structures, a retreat into a temporary ideological and rhetorical no-mans-land beyond, or indeed between, the permanent crisis of the everyday in Israel.

Extending his observations of paradox and tension within contemporary Israeli psytrance culture, Joshua’s ongoing postgraduate research is sure to offer intriguing commentary on the role of popular music and the nation state (in this case, Israel), providing fruitful comparative material for researchers of this and similar phenomena within other nations.

Holy Hype in Zion

We had big plans. Nothing less than the Holy Rave, a five day psytrance festival between September 11-15 in Timna Park in the Arava desert 20 miles north of the Gulf of Aqaba and the Israeli tourist city of Eilat on the Red Sea. Timna is the site of Solomon’s Pillars, a series of colossal sandstone columns formed by erosion over millennia. The park is also the site of ancient Egyptian copper mines and, some believe, mining under King Solomon (though nothing to do with “King Solomon’s Mines”). The mountains of The Jordan Valley are seen here to the east and the Sinai, and thus Egypt, is not far to the west: accounting for several military observation posts in the area. The event was billed as “the first international psytrance festival in Israel”, and judging by the line-up alone who could have doubted it?


























Many of Israel’s popular artists of the past and present were on the menu, amid a banquet of well known international acts. A unique feature of this event was that it would be held over Rosh Hashana (Jewish New Year) and would include a “roots/Judaism camp” complete with Habad House with legitimate rituals, prayers and meals over the national religious holiday. As Joshua wrote to me weeks before the event, the organiser “is going to great pains to make sure that many of the customs and traditions associated with this holiday will be left in tact”, a legitimating process which was no doubt one of the reasons why the event was given the green-light by authorities.

This process was driven largely by one man: Asher Haviv. The embodiment of generosity, and himself a returnee to Judaism, Haviv is like a generic uncle often identified as “the father” of Israeli psytrance. A prestigious sponsor of the trance potlatch, the Big Man of the party scene, a walking legend, he had thrown his first large scale event in 1997: Ganey Huga, promoted as “A Drugless Festival” in support of the Israeli anti-drug society and thrown on the holiday, Shavuot. The event was attended by 15,000 Transistim up for Karahana – the crazy and explosive ekstasis for which Israeli psytrance enthusiasts are known (and the title of a subsequent documentary). In July 1998 Haviv helped organize Give Trance a Chance in Tel Aviv, demonstrating government crackdowns on the scene, and would subsequently host The Gathering and another demonstration Jerusalem 2000. The somewhat disingenuous efforts to portray a “drugless” drug culture were sure to gain Haviv credibility among the establishment, within the media, and among what Joshua calls the nouveau religiuses, but it was also destined to estrange many Transistim. These disagreements would become transparent in the Holy Rave. What was I getting myself into?

The build up to the event was nothing short of a media cyclone, the gale force winds of which spiraled around Haviv who had recruited his own film crew and photographer. Spruiking “the biggest Israeli rave ever” on walla.co.il (Israel’s equivalent to yahoo) and in various newspapers like the weekend supplement of the popular Maariv along with full page adds in the Haaretz (the local equivalent to the New York Times), and appearing on a major television news talkshow, Haviv conveyed that in mounting the event he’d been guided by God to improve the condition of Israelis, and the world. To make the world a better place. It was an admirable idea, noble even, and it could only manifest within the context of what was possibly the most extravagant non-corporate party planned for a remote region in history. The Holy Rave. The grandiloquent projection of a King Sized imagination. Along with the greatest psytrance line-up ever in Israel we were to be lavished with the greatest sound system assembled for this kind of event. 15-20,000 people were predicted. The homepage had promised something called “the light at the end of the desert”, and boldly stated "This time, don't say later - where was I when it happened”.


Forward the Rave-olution

We’ve heard this kind of stuff before. The most obvious reference point is the prophet and shepherd Moses leading the Israelites from servitude to the Promised Land. But there are precedents within the visionary arts, electronic music and psychedelic trance scene where champions of new technologies and new youth cultures pontificate upon the great coming changes, and actively accelerate the future now. We could cast our eyes back to Leary’s posthuman cyberdelica, McKenna’s novelty theory and various early 1990s champions of the rave-olution, or gaze directly into the growing 13 Moon Calendar and 2012 revitalisation movement. But what springs clearly to mind is the 1994 Zippy Pronoia Tour of the US. With Fraser Clark at the helm, the Zippies used their media skills, effectively manipulating outlets like Wired’s then nascent on-line HotWired service along with High Times and the LA Times to conjure the fantasy that 60,000 people were going to show up for the biggest rave ever: the Omega Rave in the Grand Canyon planned for that August. The Zippy-Woodstock.

The Omega Rave and other Zippy developments complied with Clark’s Megatripolitan narrative of “The Future Perfect State”: the shamanic dance event as platform for inter-dimensional communication and seismic cultural shift. Around this time, Clark had proclaimed that “The Final Battle for the Human Soul will be decided here in America. And you, dear Raver or Raver-to-be, are destined to be on the front line, and already are, whether you yet realise it or not.” But there was a problem, or at least a series of problems. What with tangled allegations of cultural chauvinism, self-aggrandizement and police interference the wheels fell off the Zippy vehicle and the Omega Rave became more unmitigated disaster than household name. While a party was held in Arizona’s Kaibab National Forest as part of the World Unity Festival and Conference, it attracted well over 55,000 fewer than the initial forecast. It hardly bears mentioning that the anticipated Zippy mega-rave in Hawaii (with KLF scheduled to headline) and the planned total solar eclipse after-party in Peru, would also not come to pass. Disappointment and millenarianism appear to be intimate bed-fellows.

Jurassic Sounds

Given this equation (millenarianism = disappointment) the Holy Rave did not deviate from the program. It did not disappoint. You could argue that when it comes to millenarian projects, the greater the project, the greater the potential for disappointment. Down in Timna Park the Holy Rave surpassed the Omega Rave as the greatest rave that never happened.

So there we were driving into the valley of Timna. The concern at the main gate was immediately apparent as staff and artists outnumber punters, and the car park was almost desolate. But soon enough, speculation that something grand (or grandiose) would not come to pass here was shelved as the main stage came into view. As stated in the entrance foldout: “48 turbo sound systems strung together on 12 meter high towers with 30 subwoofers with 20 bass speakers on the ground.” Hanging wide apart, shimmering in the haze, blocking the horizon, the sound system offered monolithic accompaniment to Solomon’s Pillars, before which it stood. This was Asher’s Mt Sinai, Haviv’s Pillars, Jurassic Sounds, the medium for God’s voice.

The sound quality was exceptional, and the sweet spot seemed to cover several hectares of rocky desert. But it was punishing. I recall thinking - no, in fact, knowing - that it was too loud. Yes “too loud”, something I thought I’d never hear myself say.










Perhaps it had something to do with the fact that the 15,000 bodies expected to absorb the sound in the vast space of the Timna valley before the Pillars did not materialise. The expected numbers, along with some of the lineup (e.g. Vibrasphere and Echotek) had evaporated in the stifling heat of the Avara desert (each day was 40+ c). Now while Israelis are accustomed to desert dancing, the approximately 1500 who did show up expected shade and water (especially when this is promised, and when up to 450 shekels was being taken at the gate). The swimming hole, in the form of a delicate spring full of fish situated near the camping area turned out to be off-limits to cavorting humans. The camping area and the Main Stage were separated by a 4km round desert trek (or the wait for a shuttle bus service). Those who wanted to camp closer to the sounds made do under the only shaded areas about 3-400 metres directly in front of Jurassic Sounds. This was no beginner's dance camp. Pitching their tents inside the sound, these people had to shout at their immediate neighbours to be heard. These damaged habitués of the acidance test were in the thick of extremes – attempting to escape the 40c+ temperatures and the trek to the dance floor only to be broadsided by siege-breaking decibels for several days.

But these people didn’t come to sleep. Referring to one of the billed artists, Jörg (founder and label manager of Shiva Space Technology), these were the same Transistim who Joshua told me the German had been “trying to break” for years. While trance-habitués elsewhere may have capitulated before Jörg’s arsenal of heavy guitar sounds and hard driving kicks, out here on the frontiers of trance, in a truly impossible land and soundscape, “fullon” fanatics and passengers aboard Even Harder were travelling the distance.

The scale of the event was truly magnificent. Which is why it was dispiriting to have so few experience it. Take, for example, the Alternative Stage hosted by Mushy Records. A stellar line-up of local and international acts performing on a quality sound system before a fully shaded area with large bar at the rear and a luxuriously cushioned coffee-house in a shaded rock grotto nearby. Sounds great, and it would have been had one critical element not been absent. The party. Having camped at the back of this stage, in an area hosted by Gio Israel and the Mushy and RTTS crews, we were treated to sensational soundscapes over several nights. But while it was a privilege to be encamped among hard working artists, producers and stage hands, I could hardly suppress the suspicion that I was dwelling on the edge of the muted festal, witness to the "silent disco" in reverse, a gallant succession of cavalry charges without the cavalry. Within the context of recreational experience, it’s common to desire a place (i.e. a beach, the bush, a forest, even a tree) to yourself and/or your family and friends. But the wish for privacy and solace ceases where the place in question is a dance floor.

And so, dosed up on The Surreal Thing, as I took these pictures and other shots of the Main Stage mid-festival (yes mid-festival), observing the giant children’s inflatable waterslide, the rows of empty ticket stalls, the desolate bars, and the condo-sized automatic teller machines, I was struck by similarities with the utopian cultic phenomena. The Holy Rave was like a deserted psytrance mothership constructed in the wilderness in advance of the coming transformation, its construction, if we pursue the laws of sympathetic magic with a wild imagination, willing the transition. At night, the vast open expanse of the Timna Valley, its vacant thoroughfares lined with miles of electric lights, appeared to me like the mock airstrips of Pacific Island cargo cults.

The Habad House and the Holistic Village

So the event was held over Rosh Hashanah, a good reason why many people (who traditionally celebrate this holiday with their families) didn’t show. The temporary Habad House which included a signposted “synagogue” and images of Rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the most recent leader of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement, was populated by a small force of Chabad, the outreachers of Hasidic Judaism, along with their families. Yet hardly anybody participated in the New Year meals as planned. The Chabad however did take the opportunity to attempt to reignite the Jewish soul lying dormant around the festival. They even crashed the the yin of the festival, the Chill-Love Holistic Village to blow their shofar (rams horn) and recite lines from the Talmud amidst a meditation session guided by the harmonium playing and Om Namah Shivaya chanting yogi Lack pati nat dasa from Switzerland. The Holistic Village had been the site of workshops on alternative healing and body work practices. They were surely wasting their time here. Scrutinising my databanks for a more bizarre encounter, the search has returned with no results.

And the Chabad arrived at the Main Stage on Friday morning to deliver the word. Tehilim books were distributed at sunrise, and they aimed to blow the shofar on stage. But since even simple coordination appeared to be lacking, they had to rush the stage between sets, the trill of the shofar soon drowned out by DJ Ta-ka. No one had a clue what was going on. But one thing’s for sure, most Transistim aren’t interested in organised forms of Hasidic Judaism, especially when they’re bowing before the hanging stacks during kicking morning sessions. They aren’t down for religious ideology, messianic faith or shofar's trill, not when the savage religion can be obtained right now surfing the alpha waves under significant bass pressure. So when Haviv, the ideologue, announced his plans for the Holy Rave, the Transistim tuned out in droves. Joshua sent me a relevant passage from a great article “Dionysus in Zion” by Assaf Sagiv about the Dionysian outburst in this country in which psytrance is certainly implicated. Sagiv states that "the neo-pagan ecstatic revival has filled the vacuum left by the demise of the old Zionism, and has been fueled by a mistrust felt by many youth towards anything reminiscent of the grandiose slogans and utopian promises of an earlier day.”

Psychedelic Ghost Dance

Early Friday evening, which is the day of rest in the Jewish week, following the onstage recital of the Kiddush blessing by a very tired looking Haviv before no more than 200 people, Jerusalem’s In-Panic livened the weary with a stomping set which included the track Holy People of the Sun. The track features a voice sample referencing the “Ghost Dance”, a revitalization movement which had flourished among various indigenous groups of the Pacific Northwest in the late 1800s. The Ghost Dance was thought to secure happiness within a time of great upheaval, promising reunion of the living with the deceased. A purposeful expenditure of energy. Renewal through the abandonment of the known. Amid the dust, decibels and excess, this audio-reference somehow seemed appropriate, a recognition perhaps of the ongoing crisis in Israel, and maybe also explaining the set of elevated thermal surveillance cameras scanning the dance floor and its surrounds at night monitored from a van operated by an outfit called Top Providence. The response to the conditions of the present? The psychedelic Ghost Dance.











But the surveillance cameras were rather innocuous in the presence of the legion of photo-journalists, camera crews and anthropologists drawn like moths to a flame. And so the adventure, the excesses, the movie, rolled on. And when the final day of the shoot came round, how would Asher take all this? One would suspect he’d be miserable and dejected. Mourning the loss of the fortune committed. Hammering blue murder into a mobile. Host to an unholy rage. Actually he appeared remote from any such scenario. On Saturday morning below Solomon’s Pillars all that mattered was the immediate present, and Asher wasn’t beyond having some of that. Not at all. And so crawling out from under our rocks, all those who’d been drawn to Timna were witness to a man bent on having it. For more than eight hours Haviv occupied the main stage throughout the performance of some of his favourite artists. And so, as Astral Projection, Sun Project, California Sunshine, and the incredible Juan Verdera made good with their promises, no one, neither Aaron nor Hur, were required to steady the Holy Raver for the final shake down.

Asher Haviv was never far from centre-front stage in these final hours, shaking up a tsunami, losing his shirt, his eyes appearing to mirror a preternatural light. It occurred to me that at this point he may have been gazing directly upon “the light at the end of the desert”, animated perhaps by an energy to which most mortals are not privilege. He may actually have been staring into the brilliant headlamp of an inbound locomotive but at this point who cared. Were we who shaked under these grand pillars of sound and sandstone privilege to a shaman leading the Ghost Dance? A prophet overseeing the great dispensation? The Big Man indulging us with all he could muster? A freak unphased, at this moment, by the inherent folly of humankind? I don’t know, but I’ve never met a holier raver.

Ever felt like you were someplace you didn’t belong? Like you might never have strayed farther from home? If I were to dance inside a "distraction factory", would it look, feel and sound like this? Perhaps I'd swallowed the Blue Pill and landed in Seahaven? I was preoccupied by such questions on September 2 at Green&Blue, a daytime outdoor electro dance festival held at a swimming centre in Obertshausen near Frankfurt am Main and operated by Sven Väth’s Cocoon outfit.

A couple of months back I wrote about the emergence of Dionysus Pty Ltd (or GmbH) now mounting the fully licensed Limit Experience near you. This is the corporate sponsored and state regulated experience consumed throughout tourism and entertainment industries. With its festivals soaked in nascent marketing and promotional strategies, electronic dance music culture is deeply implicated in this branding tsunami. The trend can probably be traced to the mega-rave carnivals like Sunrise and Energy held in secretive locations off the London orbital roads in the late 1980s. Back then, events were illegal, covert, outrageous, inspirational. Party-goers disembarked from odysseysian flights into the night, and, for a charge, entered the gates of temporary sonicities, extravagant multi-staged dancescapes, theatres of abandonment, with the experience often recalled in the breviloquent language of awe and revelation. And the feeling that one was participating in a clandestine world derived in part from, as Simon Reynolds pointed out, “cocking-a-snook” at the police.

With the mega-raves, the dance concert had come into being. The separation of performer from audience explicit to the concerted rave-olution revealed a professionalizing trajectory within EDM culture, and exposed just how distant this experience was from the anarcho-sensibility experienced at free teknivals where dancers face walls of bass bins not the DJ, or, for that matter, the kinesthetic maelstrom of proto-disco, where the seamless mix began. These events also saw the flourishing of the international mega-star DJ, whose performance within a Western concert tradition became critical to reputations within what would become an increasingly competitive production and performance environment. At the orbitals, names were flown in from the US to play at cross-genre venues featuring multiple stages or tents. Rising stars were scheduled to play up against each other, hurling in dance anthems in progressively shorter set times (now the standard is one or two hours). And when the 10 second break between DJ sets was implemented and filled with applause, the artist/spectator, brand/consumer divide had been firmly established, a separation that has seemingly grown into an impassable gap since - perhaps exemplified by the local security outfit at Green&Blue called "Deescalation Service Team", along with the absence of a Chill Area.

The government sanctioning of the Dionysian vibe would be orchestrated by dance festival enterprises possibly originating with the UK’s Tribal Gathering, first held in 1993 when it attracted 25,000. More recently, we’ve seen huge club-style brandscapes like Miami’s Ultra Music Festival (part of the Winter Music Conference), the transnational Creamfields phenomenon (which had grown out of one of Britain’s first super-clubs, Cream), and the UK’s Global Gathering, which this year featured the Sputnik Vodka Launch Pad, a two story luxurious VIP deck, “extreme rides” and a fly over from the Red Arrows aerobatics team (and in 2006 was exported to Las Vegas as the Bacardi Global Gathering). In Germany, on a somewhat smaller scale, Green&Blue nevertheless finds its place in the tradition of the outdoor dance spectacle.

Branded, Literally

Green&Blue is saturated with branding, and in various ways. To begin with, in a multitude of motifs, icons and stylized devices emblazoned on t-shirts, hats and sunglasses, brands are worn by participants as fetishistic ensigns of their membership, in, or aspirations towards, an invisible community – a community inhabited by those who identify with youthful immediacy, freedom, defiance and spunk, identifications augmented by advertising campaigns, wherein such sacra are tactically fused to distinct symbols, the very symbols displayed here and now in an open-air peer-2-peer brandscape.

Secondly, various ‘partners’ and sponsors are given exclusive rights to flood the event with their product (and thus brand): typically alcohol and tobacco. With its distinctive red ensign implicit to its design, a stylish and seductive Marlboro "Flavour Lounge" featuring plush seats and free lighter give-aways, betrays an industry response to the desires for “independence, hedonism, freedom, and comfort” which tobacco giant, and owner of the Marlboro brand, Philip Morris has identified (in intensive market research) in the lifestyles of young consumers worldwide, (as reported in this article). Besides Marlboro, other products circulating included Binding beer, Red Bull, Rosmann’s Big Appler apfelwein, and Jägermeister, employing promotional campaigns aimed to attract individual stakeholders with varying promises: e.g. spontaneity, sophistication, energy.


And at the convergence of these trends, in concerted efforts to reinforce brand loyalty, build brand communities and develop branded personalities, participants are lavished with ‘free’ gear like Marlboro jet flame lighters, Jäger glow-in-the-dark pendents, sun hats, and bikinis distributed by heeled high Jägerettes and other cute and bubbly spokesmodels (and often in return for mailing addresses for future direct promotion campaigns). In possibly the rawest promotional strategy, partiers already drunk on the spectacle and a cocktail of intoxicants, offered their bare skin for temporary logo tattooing by the Jägerettes in


















return for a free mouthful of the sweet liqueur. Literally branded on necks, arms, and foreheads, participants in various states of delerium prostrated themselves before corporate efforts to foment what has been labeled “brand energy”: where a brand becomes associated with a meaningful and positive experience. There are possibly fewer contexts more effective than a dance festival (or indeed a sports event) to raise this kind of energy. Within a branded vibe little removed from the mall in downtown Default City, the temporary character of the corporate logo amplifies the fleeting and tragic character of consumer tribalism.

Electromegalomania

Administering his sound high above this scene, yet deeply implicated in it, was Sven Väth, once referred to in the NME as the “Holy Man and Big Chief of European Techno”. Obertshausen is the hometown of Väth the “trancehouse” pioneer and electro practitioner who performed before over 6,000 people in a distinctly Electro-fied atmosphere. Down on the floors and across the venue, its a big day out for a mostly working class population from Frankfurt in their late teens to late twenties, some of whom have arrived from parties the night before,














or are even part of groups implicated in more traditional rituals.
Among many males I detected a slick muscle-pumped confidence between short tapered hair and denim jeans, for females, a fashion doll body consciousness.














Within the soundscape provided by electro, and echoed in the demeanour of elevated male (there were no females on the lineup) poseurs spinning records and mastering cool, the entire venue seemed to be a staging ground for the performance of inflated personalities, not uncommon to any dance environment fueled by a mix of beer, speed, ecstasy and cocaine. If The Matrix was a dance floor, I’d imagine it might look like this - complete with de-escalation agents. And, all day at the side of the main stage, or indeed as an extension of it, a raised platform was jammed with friends-of-Sven, disco-sycophants, and other seekers of attention, the entire gesticulating edifice a stage for coke-fueled self-exaltation.

Down far below this spectacle, I was deep inside Handbag Country. There were no Indian or locally made utility belts to be seen here. Common to the world of psytrance, and certainly not uninfluenced by fashion stakes, utility belts evince practical sartoriality, enabling one to optimise the potential for entering sustained states of self-transcendence far from home without concern for possessions (e.g. cameras, money, credit cards, passports, mobile phones, rolling tobacco, magic potion), which are slung around the waist of the dance-traveller in states of self-abandonment at multi-day and night events. But here within the landscape of the electro-tourist big-day-out spectacular, I was remote from the multi-pocketed lifestyles and visionary mindstates of the psychedelic trance-traveler.

Not a head music, this was most distinctively a body music, one which is not only the mark of Green&Blue but hugely popular throughout Germany. In his recent Turn the Beat Around: The Secret History of Disco, Peter Shapiro makes a curious point about popular dance forms (in American culture).
After wars and traumatic events, American popular music has always returned to the body as a locus of meaning and turned its back on language: after the Civil War, barn dances and square dances were all the rage, and this was also when burlesque dancing began in the United States with the vaudevillean skirt dance; the end of World War I saw the dawning of the Jazz Age, World War II saw rock and roll. And he suggests that at the end of the 1960s and Vietnam war protest America experienced an escape into disco. Following this logic, and shifting our focus to Germany, the post-Wall (and Cold War) context appears to have conditioned the turn to the non-rhetorical grounds of electro – in a body re-unifying context of consciousness loss and narcissism. What is also interesting in this and other forms of music, is that the underground and rebellious sensibility passing from the earliest disc-cultures into all subsequent dance cultures, appears spectacularly corrupt and faux at Green&Blue. According to Shapiro, the defiance of fascism embodied in the Hitler-era Jugend Youth (or “Swing Kids”) in Germany and other clandestine disc-cultures in Paris during the Occupation, gave critical shape to disco - and, as we might read, to subsequent electronic dance cultures where an outlaw sensibility is commonly adopted, even when those who make party do so within totally licensed and commodified dancescapes. Green&Blue appears to have stronger roots in the concert tradition and in the standardisation of clubbing, entertainment and recreational experience than the “Swing Kids”.

And back up on the main stage, while Ricardo Villalobos performed at the electro-house stage, apparently retaining the “selfacknowledged narcissism” he’d acquired in the early 1980s (see his biography on the Väth's website), Väth had his way with the crowd, grinding away for 6 hours before finally yammering ejaculatory remarks into the microphone at the death (of the set and the festival) coinciding with a climactic fireworks display. Given that electro appears to be a genre characterised by an unpredictable series of explosions, pulsations and appearance, this spectacle seemed more than appropriate.

Alice Out of Wonderland

During the day Wolfgang Sterneck told me “there are too many highlights in this music”. Wolfgang is founder of the Alice/Connecta project, the drug and culture project I had arrived at the event with. At Green&Blue Alice was a breath of fresh air, so far from Wonderland. In my view Alice offered the only element directing the vibe of the festival away from the spectacular brandscape. And it was quite a contrast. As something of a safety portal offering access to parts beyond the Matrix, Alice volunteers set up an information stall at the rear of the area (with a couple of “guerrilla” stalls at other locations closer to either floor). Basic yet vital information about a range of substances circulating within dance scenes is provided on small attractive cards, many with psychedelic designs. But the cards aren’t merely instructive about drugs. One card is entitled “Party-Politics” and reads “Every party is political. There needn’t be banners hanging with a political demand everywhere”. “Who makes money out of the party? Is it a single person who thrives on inflated admission charges?” “How do people interact with each other at a party? Is it collaborative or are all on an Ego-trip?” “Do all reverentially look up to the DJ and acclaim whatever he may do?”

Pertinent questions in this environment.


Thanks to Wolfgang Sterneck for many of these photos

August 18 2007, I made the 10th anniversary of Berlin’s Fuckparade, self-described as “an international political network of sub-, club-, and youth cultures”. From its kick-off on Karl-Marx-Allee (formerly Stalin Allee and scene of the 1953 Uprising) I landed amidst a sensational protestival rolling its way through the district of Friedrichshain, formerly in the east and once separated from Kreuzberg by the Berlin Wall. Following reunification, Friedrichshain would become a creative hub for young artists and musicians attracted to the area’s low rent accommodation, squats and cultural centres. Each featuring its own sound system, DJ line-up and speakers positioned to the rear, about a dozen audio floats sounded out predominantly Gabba and other hardcore styles, amid Jungle/DnB, Techno, House, Electro, live bands and MCs. Throughout the afternoon and into the early evening, the motley cavalcade saw up to 5,000 tailgaters revelling in the exhaust of these crawling breakneck rhythm machines. Under heavy police presence and surveillance, the parade toured significant sites in the local alternative milieu, terminating finally at the former railway maintenance yard, the Reichsbahn Ausbesserungs Werk Franz Stenzer, now the RAW Tempel, a large non-profit alternative community arts organisation.


Protestival: Carnivals of Resistance

With the model provided by Reclaim the Streets and, later, the carnivals Against Capitalism and For Global Justice associated with the alter-globalization, peace and climate change movements, the protestival had come of age. A term coined by Sydney radical technician and IJ (idea jockey), “protestival” refers to an event combining party and protest, carnival and campaign, pleasure and militancy. Among artivists everywhere, and especially in the wake of legislation criminalizing electronic dance music cultures (e.g the UK’s Criminal Justice Act 1994 and The US “Rave Act” 2003), there would be more at stake in dancing, to a range of music, than simply the enjoyment of pleasure – if pleasure was indeed ever that simple. Throughout the 1990s, dancing became more than a recreational pursuit, and given the laws ranged against dance – especially in the open air - dancing outside would become a political performance. Disembarking from nocturnal clubs, in the mid-1990s UK ravers danced into the daylight, reclaiming the streets from routines of transit and capital; dancing for a multitude of causes: from the right to dance to ecological and humanitarian issues (see this article at MC Reviews: Global Protestival).

Around the same time (1995) the NachtTanzDemo (or “Night Dance Demo”) emerged in Frankfurt. Involving several sound systems, the first street occupation protested tight regulations and permit requirements restricting alternative club and dance culture in the city. Organised by an alliance of cultural and political projects, KulturOffensive (including alternative party crews like Club Kiew and Dionysos, the Alice-Project and Connecta, along with antifascist youth-organizations and leftwing students) and having survived brutal efforts by the state to suppress it, the now popular annual NachtTanzDemo attracts multiple causes including homelessness and squatters rights (see Wolfgang Sterneck, “Islands: Techno, Tribes and Politics”).

While this event catalyzed the fusion of party and politics in Frankfurt, German dance-activism has become enshrined in the Fuckparade. Originating in 1997 (when it was called The Hate Parade) as a small protest challenging the abuse of the right for demonstration and free speech by the organisers of Berlin’s Love Parade (now held outside Berlin and sponsored by a brewery and a chain of fitness centers) and other commercial events whose dance music aesthetics are perceived to exemplify an expressive formula dismissed as hedonistic and orgiastic, by its tenth year, the Fuckparade had become a mobile hardcore carnival of resistance: a hardparade. In its mobile and performative Fuck You!, the Fuckparade had made transit from a reactionary anti-Love Parade event to one mobilizing proactive causes such as free and autonomous spaces. Yet, as a carnival of resistance, there is no singular message conveyed by participants who, in the tradition of recent protestivals, converge to resist multiple causes; who raise their middle fingers to a multitude of conditions, and who dance in different locations: including the numerous after parties that have grown around the annual event featuring line-ups on multiple stages: from EBM, Dark Electro, Industrial, Powernoise at the RAW Tempel’s Schlagstrom Festival, to the Speedcore-dominated Fuckparade Afterhour, to a broad spectrum at the Internationales Subkulturefest, to minimal and electro at the c-base Space Station on the River Spree.

Fuck Who? Fuck You! The Parade of Terror

In many cases, paraders communicate a “fuck you!” attitude because they can, because it feels good to do so. A sea of defiant gestures comprise a negative identification: i.e. that “we are absolutely not soft”. Observing these interventions I was reminded of Monty Python’s “Knights Who Say Ni”, only here it was the “Rebels Who Say Fuck”: or even “fuck you, you fucking fuck”.


















There is an aesthetics of resistance inhabited by the rebel who, through gestures, sonics and t-shirt semiotica, finds pleasure in, and derives identity from, breaking laws and moral codes, from being an outlaw. Here “law” might mean legal statutes, codes of conduct and rules of propriety: e.g. the spitting, sneering, finger raising, outlandish piercing, noise and sexualised displays of punk. Deviant cool – its all on display at the Fuckparade. But here attitude accelerates with the bpm. In his Subculture: The Meaning of Style, Dick Hebdige held punks as guerrilla semioticians, style terrorists, whose unruly, inscrutable and perhaps unpredictable rule breaking behaviour (in dress, piercings, language and gesture) amounted to their challenge to “mainstream society”. It follows that a guerrilla sensibility has evolved within hardcore scenes, where “Terrorcore” has emerged as an appealing aesthetic. There is little doubt that anti-terror legislation has fed this appeal, enhancing subcultural potency, rendering that which was hard harder, terrifying even more terrible. Speaking from the back of a sound truck at the beginning of the parade, Trauma XP, one of the event's organizers and DJ of hardcore material celebrating “an average speed of about 250-300 bpm”, weighed the prospect of his hardcore outfit Bembelterror (a label under which he may eventually seek to distribute), along with numerous hardcore acts and tracks using the word “terror” on “a metaphorical and self-ironic level”, becoming subject to prohibitions in the UK (and potentially elsewhere), given that a clause in the UK Terrorism Act 2006 made the extremely spurious act of “glorification of terrorism” an offence. If you were trading in subcultural capital, you’d be moving your options to Trauma XP.

Terror-chic is most curious given the global War on Terror and, in this case, efforts by the German government under Paragraph 129a of the Criminal Code. Pertaining to membership in a “terrorist organisation”, introduced in the 1970s in response to the activities of the Red Army Faction, and typically used to gather information and intimidate activists, Paragraph 129a was used following the June G8 protests in Rostock to arrest activists suspected (i.e. detained without sufficient evidence) of being members of Militante Gruppe (MG - targeted by the state as a “terrorist” organisation suspected of carrying out multiple arson attacks in Berlin since 2001). Among those detained was Andrej Holm, a sociologist from the Institute for Social Research at Berlin's Humboldt University who specialises in urban gentrification and tenants’ rights, and who has apparently published material using language federal police (in their farcical public case against Holm) claim can be found in MG texts, and is believed to have “conspired” with members of MG suspected of carrying out arson attacks on unmanned police vehicles (in meetings in which police have stressed that Holm left his mobile phone at home!). This threat to intellectual freedom has triggered condemnation from international academic associations, and domestic demonstrations under the slogan: “we are all 129a” or “we are all terrorists now”. Why? According to one flyer: you may be a suspected terrorist under this law if you are German, have access to a library, and can read and write.








In this climate, Terrorcore and associated hardcore electronica has been handed outlaw credibility as demonstrated, for example, on popular “Terror Worldwide (Kid Tested / Mother Approved)” and “Terror for Fun and Profit” hoodies, “Oldskool Terror” t-shirts and countless slogans involving the word “terror” printed on clothing and banners. But its not all semiotics, for the theme for this year's Fuckparade was “Terrornetzwerk §129a” implying that, given recent events, Germans are all terrorists now.



This might suit surf-riders of the digital apocalypse grinding their teeth and wild-styling a shock-producing hardcore aesthetic. But that which is “hard” may incorporate more than sonic and sartorial statements on the edge of style, like mobilisations in support of political actions and social movements. Anarcho-punk is relevant here. Seeking distance from scenes, which, while cloaked in noise and rebellion, were considered narcissistic and acquiescent in practice, UK anarcho-punk (which was a significant wellspring for the Reclaim the Streets movement) had adopted a form of hardcore which sought to merge the party with the political, a fusion traced to sixties DiY.

“You Are Now Leaving the Capitalist Sector”

Like RTS, the NachtTanzDemo and antecedents, the Fuckparade has become a vehicle for multiple causes: in particular the defence of autonomous spaces and cultural projects threatened by gentrification and unlawful police interventions. This year, the parade’s route took in several squats and cultural centres threatened either through eviction or rent increases under the plans of developers Media Spree who seek to transform the banks of the River Spree from the Jannowitzbrücke bridge to the Elsenbrücke bridge into "Berlin's future media and services quarter" - a transition underway with MTV Central Europe just along the river. Among those sites threatened with demolition and replacement by an Urban Entertainment Center, O2-World and luxury flats, are Köpi 137 (the long running left autonomous space outside which the parade halted to reflect on the red and black flag waved from the high roof, with a sign on its fortified gate reading “You Are Now Leaving the Capitalist Sector”), Bar 25, the Eisfabrik (Ice Factory) and the 12 year old Space Station in Mitte run by the c-base cooperative and referred to as a cultural centre for Berlin’s “off culture”. The parade's huge police escort led it to a prearranged halt outside the RAW Tempel in Revaler St which saw fast breaks ricocheting from its high tagged brick walls until 9:30 pm, and potted plants raining down from the first floor balcony of an apartment building. Curiously it was uncertain whether this guy was outraged or just being outrageous, an uncertainty echoing the parade’s essential ambivalence, and indicating why the state feels it necessary to have a small army of heavily equipped police around to monitor and control its spatial and temporal boundaries.

As it tours sites of interest within the city’s alternative milieu, the Fuckparade is a mobile anarcho-bazaar seeking support for multiple causes (e.g. queer rights, squatters rights, drug awareness). For instance, I was handed a card with “Stasi 2.0” printed beneath a stencilled image of Minister for the Interior, Wolfgang Schäuble, part of a campaign attacking Schäuble’s desires for increased surveillance measures, and moreover, the government’s plans to pursue EU Directive 2006/24/EG compelling EU states to retain data on citizens. The prospect of the German government profiling its citizens’ movements, contacts and personal relationships through recording and storing email and phone communications records over a period of six months and made accessible to police, public prosecutors, secret services and foreign states (already in practice in the UK and the US) is reminiscent, for many, of the secret policing tactics of the Stasi.

The Stasi 2.0 t-shirt.

Alice/Connecta Project

I arrived at the Fuckparade with the Alice-Project, a grass roots drug awareness group from Frankfurt, which incorporates Connecta, a project encouraging free cultural and educational events. With a side-banner reading “Lebst Du schon oder kaufst Du noch? Freiräume entwickeln!” (“Are you living yet or still buying? Develop free spaces!”), the first part of which is a subversion of the Ikea slogan: "Lebst Du noch oder wohnst Du schon?" ("Are you alive yet, or just living?"), the brightly painted Alice van joined the parade. I had hitched a ride with the delightful Pippi Longstocking-inspired Alice volunteer Susanne Riemann from Sonica in Italy and the Waldfrieden Wonderland Festival (Alice in Wonderland – that’s another story). Alice is the brainchild of Wolfgang Sterneck, a tireless project coordinator, advocate of free cultural spaces, and prolific author of books on German counter culture. A forerunner in efforts to combine style and politics, or, as he would have it “rhythm and change,” Sterneck has been heavily involved in numerous projects in Germany including the Cybertribe Festival and Frankfurt’s Gathering of the Tribes, the name for which was encouraged by his participation in a networking event with the same name in California in 2001 (and that event, in turn, takes its name from the momentous Gathering of the Tribes for a Human Be-In held in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, on January 12 1967).

Back on the streets of Friedrichshain, the diversity of registers was ultimately echoed in the music. With its famous 1.3 km muralised freedom commemorating section of the Berlin Wall called the “East Side Gallery”, on Mühlenstraße I caught distinctively '80s new wave emissions escaping from one truck, sounds competing with, and drowned out by, ensuing Techno and Speedcore dedicated systems. At one critical juncture along Mühlenstraße, as gesticulating crowds shifted through creeping sweet spots and van-loads of riot police raced in from side-streets to secure a service station back down the road, a DJ on the lead float - a covered cart pulled by a paint-tagged tractor - played Spiral Tribe’s “Forward the Revolution”.

Many thanks to Susanne Riemann who took some of the photos here.

Sonica 2007: the third installment of the annual Italian psytrance festival. Held in mountain pine woodland in Liguria between La Spezia and Genoa 1000 metres above sea level close to the famed Cinque Terre National Park, this was a truly remarkable location with spectacular views of the Vara Valley. Here, when wheeling one’s head to the heavens from the Main Stage, you copped a face full of sky. The event featured one of the better line-ups of the European summer season: with standout performances from a range of artists including the masterful Frank E from Koxbox, the haunting melody-lines of Silicon Sound’s puppet master Johannes Regnier, along with James Munro and the sensational Elfi pizza collective. Perhaps 5000 mostly Italians turned out for this sky-high romper stomper not far from the Riviera. As Didac, a Spanish Obelix t-shirt wearing and Getafix drinking camp-mate, confirmed: “these Romans are crazy!”




Upgrade to the Longer Now

But wait, is that a Bouncy Castle right there in the middle of the festival? No, its Club Duracell. Officially known as the Duracell Powerhouse (and on its European “Power Up” tour), this is an air-inflated tent shaped like a long-life Duracell battery pitched mid-festival. With a sound system, smoke machine and dance club atmosphere inside, the Battery featured a full line-up of DJs whose set-times were listed in the Sonica booklet alongside the artists performing on the Main and Alternative stages.


Enticing young people all over Europe with the prospect of swapping their “tired batteries” for “shiny new Duracell Ultra M3s”, hustling brand loyalty and reinforcing a perma-cycle of disposability, Duracell offer festival participants a “free battery exchange.” I’m not sure what was more inflated: the tent or Sonica’s claims to be “in regard of the environment and for the use of renewable energies”.

The line comes from the promotional literature for this “Celebrating Nature” edition of the festival. Sonica appeared to have responded to past criticisms and the special requirements of the venue with their solar powered shower and lighting, some apparent investment in a “carbon sink” re-forestation program in Costa Rica, separate garbage bags for recyclable waste and cigarette butt containers, and efforts by green t-shirt wearing “eco-team” volunteers to “reduce the negative impact of human activity on the ecosystem.” But with the Duracell Powerhouse “partying into the early hours, making the music last longer, much longer” (from it’s website), is this appropriation of environmental virtue – now commonly practiced by businesses globally as “greenwashing” - justified? Can we take any of this stuff seriously?

What are the costs of making now last longer? Self-identifying as the “leading brand of batteries globally”, Duracell are among the chief manufacturers of (non-rechargeable and non-recyclable) alkaline batteries, classified as hazardous waste (potentially leaking harmful potassium hydroxide) in many parts of the world. They are a transnational corporation promoting lifestyle and energy usage practices that are inherently unsustainable, albeit “longer lasting”. With its unsustainable promise of sustainability, Duracell leaves a massive footprint given that the manufacture and use of its primary product is tied to non-renewable energy consumption, disposability and pollution. So what are we make of this bloated icon of disposability powering up and broadsiding Sonica's “neo-tribal” Duende Village, an arena for presentations, workshops and films promoting an “eco-sustainable future”? According to its initiators, Duende is “a mysterious and indescribable force, a creative fire similar to the vital lymph that courses through the roots of human sensibility, feeding the collective imagination with dreams of utopia and a better world.” Dreaming about utopia and a better world while ecologically unsound agents of the old world snore gruffly down the back of your neck requires a set of quality moulded earplugs; not to mention a strong disposition to endure this chicanery.

Then there's the nearby Healing area featuring shiatsu, ayurvedic massage, crystal healing, reiki and aura imaging (with a sweatlodge out the back). Out the front, squaring-off upon some kind of karmic battleground, a Javanese-style stone meditating Buddha’s head faced down the swollen copper-top. And what should we infer from signs hanging along a wooded path to the Main Stage presumably painted by those working for Sonica: “Leave no Trace” and “Another World is Possible”? Apparently it amounts to outrageous hypocrisy and probably goes someway towards explaining why I felt cheated, powerless, deflated, each time I wandered past the Duracell Sweatlodge, an exasperation common among many participants I met.

In a period which has seen the flourishing of rechargeable alternatives in a range of devices from digital media players to palm top computers and cell phones, and given the emergence of self-powered (i.e. shakelights, dynamos, solar powered) flashlights, radios etc (Duracell now also market their own cranklights), it appears that a light has cranked on inside Duracell’s advertising and promotions brainstrust undoubtedly responding to the mounting danger of obsolescence… Ten years from now this picture might appear more ludicrous than it does even now:



Energy Sacrifice & The Party


Festivals of varying stripes offer an intriguing lens on consumer practices (and profit making), as they also provide witness to the necessity for profitless or directionless consumption. As Georges Bataille (following the excellent work of Frank Gauthier in the collection Rave Culture and Religion) discussed in relation to sacrifice:

"The meaning of this profound freedom is given in destruction, whose essence is to consume profitlessly whatever might remain in the progression of useful works. Sacrifice destroys that which it consecrates … This useless consumption is what suits me, once my concern for the morrow is removed. And if I thus consume immoderately, I reveal to my fellow beings that which I am intimately: Consumption is the way in which separate beings communicate. Everything shows through, everything is open and infinite between those who consume intensely.”

As any follower of Bataille might inform us, dance parties are natural sites of excess, for an experientially intense consumption of excess “energy”, the orchestration and performance of wild abandon, for the burning up in potlatch-like proportions that which had been translated as society’s “accursed share”. As a fellow Australian I met on the edge of the Main Floor holding a plastic bottle containing a mixture of absinthe and something unknown encouraged me: “go ahead and have yourself a party”. What are the implications for preventing or suppressing such intensive moments of mass consumption as the all-night trance festival or any of its equivalents, from subcultural revelries to more accepted social wingdings rippling across contemporary cultures participants in which periodically rally to spend themselves in sometimes outrageous derangements? What is the consequence of conserving such energies, of preventing the expression of desires for radical otherness, of merging with the Other, and thus the sacred, in ecstatic moments when one is literally outside of one’s Self in the presence of others?

In their freakish extremes, their voguish edgework and their outlandish vibe, it is perhaps these habitués of the psytrance festival and events similar who embody an answer. Unravelling their Selves amid passionate gesticulations illuminated by turbulent fire staffs, glow poi and an array of advanced lighting, and with the aid of a growing platter of psychoactive chemicals and “shamanic” herbs; modifying their bodies in simple or baroque tattoo designs evoking mystery, nature and gothic struggles, combating entropy with lobe scalpelling, staplings, dermal anchors and flesh pockets; becoming locked in nocturnal têt'à têtes with punishing Kindzadza-style dark-psy or horrortrance at 165+bpm, surfing the devil’s frequency down the front of the stacks; sonic riders seeking the perfect rave, addicted to vertigo, driven to madness. These are contexts for epic derailments of the mind, and violent interventions upon the body, which sometimes, given most unfortunate circumstances, might even be fatal: a local man died of an alleged overdose of atropine cut cocaine at Sonica 07. But in a Bataillian general economy, without these, and less extreme states of embodiment and out-of-body-ment, there might never be community, but instead, in the extreme, the state controlled sacrificial catastrophe of perma-war. In this logic, the wider implications for the repression, domestication and privatisation of Carnival and ekstasis in the contemporary United States, as for example recently documented by Barbara Ehrenreich in her Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy (a good idea though questionable scholarship), are considerable, disastrous even.

Since these events are periodic, often seasonal, we might call psytrance festivals or any of their equivalents within electronic dance music culture, moments through which human communities are recharged; investments in renewable culture and identity, made renewable through collective acts of becoming “wasted”, “losing it”, getting “trashed”, going “out there”; sacrificial contexts through which the organic need for luxury have evolved. In this way, the non-productive expenditure of one’s self through lavish self-abandonment and limit-pushing ventures is productive, even if only of equilibrium and peace. But this is not the romanticised “collective effervescence” made famous through Emile Durkheim’s armchair anthropology - which now appears to be a term better approximating the sound caused as two or more cans of Fanta are cracked open - but a theory of excess which recognises the value of waste, of transgression, sacrifice, advanced munterment: the apocalypse of subjectivity. Though this is not to suggest that these aren’t intimately related to questions of revitalisation or redress in any observations of the sacred margins: their orgiastic convulsions, their mystical potency. From the perspective of deckchair or beanbag anthropology, if the aroma of a five-day dance floor adds anything to this discussion, perhaps “collective putrescence” might be a more apt description.

From the perspective of most contributions to the collection on Australian techno countercultures, FreeNRG: Notes From the Edge of the Dance Floor (downloaded from that link @ Undergrowth), the “energy” gifted in the form of resources, art, skills and time, to produce the free dance party “doof”, along with the exhaustive expenditure of energy on the dance floor, amounts to festal sacrifice essential for the reproduction of variant alternative techno-tribes. This gifting (i.e. voluntary labour, donated equipment, skillsharing, communal meals etc) to reproduce the party space operates within an alternative economy associated with a co-operative sensibility and whose countercultural ethos is integral to the visionary culture within which psytrance has evolved. Crucially these music and dance cultures demonstrate commitments to the celebration and defence of nature: a desire to reconcile with and protect the natural world considered sacred and enchanting. But FreeNRG is several removes from Sonica whose patrons demand optimised modes of luxury and expenditure and whose organisers operate without the slightest hint of embarrassment otherwise generated by their own duplicity.

The celebration of abandonment and energy consumption, as any decent festal moment might be defined, appears to have been taken literally by Sonica, whose operators accepted sponsorship and on-site marketing from a corporation whose product competes with claims towards "celebrating nature." And thus competes with the countercultural legacy of psytrance, its culture and festivals, the social aesthetic of which traditionally seeks freedom, not without contradiction, from prevailing practices of rapacious materialism laying waste to the planet. This alternative vibe is under perennial strain as it struggles to assert an identity against that which it seeks freedom from (i.e. corporate greed, ecological destruction, prejudice). And this negative aesthetic is in dispute with the directionless opening towards oblivion otherwise prevailing, the erotic impulse for discontinuity, discharge, bliss, which cares little for what happens after the orgy.

While beat freaks surrender to the pounding rhythms predominating, they are, at the same time, resistant to the consensus trance, sceptical of official culture, committed to modes of consumer opposition: an acute ecstatic/activist paradox defining identity. Given preoccupations with ecological and humanitarian crises downstream from radical forebears and “tomorrow people”, many psytrance habitués demonstrate a mounting apprehension for what transpires “on the morrow”, their disenchantment with conditions derivative of over-consumption conflicting with the desire for sacrificial consumption in the general economic logic of Bataille; their party and lifestyle also the vehicle, through drama, pedagogy and technique, for an alternative world.

Alternative lifestyle and consumer practices – including the increased popularity of self-powered flashlights - render these events a specifically resistant register. Which begs one to ask: What’s cranking in Italy?

Thanks to Susanne Riemann for some photos used here.

It was July 2007. I guess I had travelled to Greece to locate the Dionysian festal, in a region proximate to its origins. I wanted to dig around the roots of what now passes for carnival, but which, under Christian and commercial interests, has been domesticated in the modern West. I travelled to the island of Limnos in the Northern Aegean for the Island of Fire Festival, a psytrance festival on a remote sandy beach near the village of Moudros on a tree devoid island shaped like a horseshoe.

The heat was stifling, and the setting sun a daily epic over the calming waters of the Aegean Sea. The stage was set for Dionysus to stomp forth in towering sheets of flame, bearing barrels of red wine and sumptuous treats unlooked for. Or so I imagined, mistakenly, for things hadn’t quite gone to plan on the Island of Fire. With numerous big-ticket acts including Vibrasphere, Kenji Williams, Youth, Solar Fields, Gabriel Le Mar, Beat Bizarre, Tripswitch, along with about 30 other performers like Klopfgeister and Carbon Based Lifeforms, full live bands, and a raised purpose built stage, the project was ambitious. Yet with more than 2,000 people fewer than the 3,000 expected, the party was more a warm cup of chai tea on a remote beach than a dance conflagration. An extravagant private party. Now, a warm chai on a remote beach isn’t bad at all, nor is Kenji Williams and his amazing wife, dancer Sayoko, turning up at your party.

But this wasn’t the way it was meant to be.

Unlike the earlier Samothraki festival, held on the nearby island of that name (which attracted 10,000 people by 2003, and would be closed down by Greek authorities that year), the Dionysian vibe failed to materialise, with the global freaks synonymous with psytrance filtering through in small numbers only. Certainly, splayed out in small pockets along the beach, many party-goers (along with the legion of contracted DJs) enjoyed themselves in acts of spontaneous combustion, and the acoustics of the bay were fabulous, the stage flush with a smooth rock cliff dropping to form a right-angle at one end of the beach. But the dance floor never reached high tide, and the music too diverse for a single stage. The event was an unmitigated blow-out.



It was fair to say that I was disappointed. Musing on why I hadn’t danced with Dionysus or his Maenads, it occurred to me that I may have encountered them all the same, and in places I’d hardly anticipated, though with which I was already quite familiar. The tourism and recreational service industries upon which Greece relies is saturated with the Dionysian, or some adulterated version of it. It had enveloped me on my pre-festival visit to the island of Hydra, and a few days after the event, Dionysus was carousing Myrina, the port of Limnos, the central thoroughfare of which—a cobble-stoned avenue lined with souvenir and cellular phone stores snaking its way from the harbour to the sun-lounged beaches—I plied for several days smouldering like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day. In what seemed like endless days waiting for the ferry (to Samothraki), I knew that the god of wine was not absent, just distributed. Not barred, just bar-coded. Not dead, but re-animated by media corporations and entertainment conglomerates, styled, packaged and promoted according to detailed readings of the latest market research. Anyone for Dionysus Lite?

How many days did I skulk about in that café-bar drawing on a frappé enduring Olivier Newton John’s Twist of Fate on Sky FM? Why do I know all the lines to this, and how did I become haunted by Phil Collins?

These aren’t exactly original thoughts. Post-Nietzsche and certainly after Mikhail Bakhtin’s Rabelais and His World, which explored how the carnivalesque passed into literature and modern consciousness following the adventures of Gargantua and Pantagruel, carnival has broken the levy and floods everyday, and everynight, life in our post-Seven Eleven world of round-the-clock social recreations. From café-bars to virtual town squares, from tour groups to all night dance parties, the “people’s second world”, as Bakhtin dubbed the carnival, has proliferated throughout contemporary social life, a theme obsessing French sociologist Michel Maffesoli. In The Shadow of Dionysus: Towards a Sociology of the Orgy, Maffesoli explored what he called the “orgiasm.” The orgiastic impulse to be together in conclaves of conviviality pervades the present characterised by passional associations the Frenchman called empathetic neo-tribes, fluid and temporary micro-communities often driven by no purpose other than to be together with fellow travellers. From dance clubs to sporting associations, these reservoirs of puissance are geared towards the orgiastic climax of the festal, those moments of pure consumption occasioning transgressions of imposed morality: pleasure for pleasure’s sake. As the late 20th century t-shirt and bumper sticker read: “It’s all good.”

The carnivalisation of everyday life has also concerned criminologist Mike Presdee, who takes a rather different approach. Presdee’s Cultural Criminology and the Carnival of Crime explores how the “logic of transgression,” the pleasure that is obtained in breaking rules, proliferates within media, entertainment, and consumerism, as the rules, codes, and laws governing social behaviour multiply. With satellite television, net-porn and a host of newly conceived vicarious interactions, transgression is in hot demand as the outlawing and licensing of the disorder and disorientation implicit to carnival sees the latter flourish in bizarre commodified and virtual forms. “It is the nature of the carnival,” states Presdee, “to resist containment and closure.” In this view, regimented and regulated by official culture on the one hand, registered and trademarked on the other, Presdee offers sanguine suggestions about the criminal career of Dionysus torn loose from his moorings. “[T]he unofficial second life of the people is driven deeper and deeper from view and comprehension,” such that we are now in the midst of a rampaging “carnival without closure”. Maybe it wasn’t all good after all.

The commodification of transgression is a theme taken up by a host of thinkers, among them Thomas Frank, whose The Conquest of Cool recounts the pimping of the counterculture by the advertising industry. Hippies, freaks and other “edgemen” were involved in a headlong commitment to embrace ekstasis, to trespass across the psychic limits, a motivation inherited by contemporary psytrance habitués. But as Frank discusses, radical self-abandonment and psychedelic visionary states were, if not subject to repressive ordinance, usurped by business execs and chic designers exploiting the desire for transgression, for being experienced, which could now be obtained drinking Coca Cola’s Fruitopia or behind the wheel of a Chrysler. Up on billboards everywhere, Dionysus was good for business.

Not too far removed geographically from the God’s original haunts, this was all fairly de riguer on Limnos, where the Greek military, incidentally, maintain a sizable presence so close to Turkey. On the streets of Myrina in July the transgressions of the modern Bacchanal, stifled in a cove 20km to the east, were channeled into the safety dance of the Grecian tourist industry, relocated to the parental world of controlled discharges and surveillance, confined to units moved and packages offered by The Mysteries™. A faint reminder might have been found at the Hotel Limnos or in any of the other hotels, bars and gaming salons vying for the tourist €. But for initiates of the Speedo Cult who work on their tans during the day, shifting back Amstel Pulse at Club Energy after the sun goes down, for couples temporarily vacating their routine or routinely vacating, and thus, as Sherry Turkle once stated, possibly never knowing “anything but workdays and days off work”, Dionysus rarely loses his trousers.

Workers of the world demand vacation security alongside job security, all the more in a global climate where uncertainty is synonymous with insecurity (and thus where certainty IS security). A secure vacation appears assured by the state’s persistent bludgeoning of the edges of predictability, made possible as rights for administering the “Limit Experience” are granted to Dionysus Industries Pty Limited, enabled as direct phenomenal experience is replaced by vicarious entertainments like that enjoyed when tuning into Survivor.

With no chance to be voted off the island, I heard stories of thousands who’d been prevented to travel to Limnos. At several ports of disembarkation, police searched festival-bound freak bodies, cars and belongings for illicit substances. Festival organiser Haris Papadimitriou from It Records and Freeze Magazine, informed me that military command on the island made the event a no-go-zone for its personnel, among them Sideliner, an artist originally on the bill. Quietly fuming in an email: “Headquarters did not give him permission to play at the rave!!!” Haris was also disappointed that police had apparently confused him with the organisers of the Samothraki events a few years earlier. Before the party started, he’d spent several hours pleading for the release of one of his crew found in possession of a very small quantity of hash and jailed. This incident appeared to have fed the kind of hysteria necessary for agents of Apollo everywhere to maintain order in the face of perennial threats to stability, dangers embodied in folk devils lubricating the machinery of boundary maintenance in the Age of Security. I was even told a story about police strip-searching someone’s child for drugs (they found none). Despite all the appropriate permissions from the Mayor, the authorities weren’t about to permit Dionysus to raise his flute on Limnos.

Millennia downstream from Plato, who had himself railed against “bestial gatherings” and sought the banning of the Bacchanal, was this the function of the repression of the Island of Fire Festival: to allow safe transgressions to smoulder throughout Greece like a controlled burn? If it was the case then this is not, of course, a circumstance particular to populations in the Aegean and northern Greece. It is the lot of those dwelling in the neo-liberal information age, where raging social conflagrations are routinely hosed so as to maintain an entirely predictable outcome in which state order and profit are intimate accomplices.

In Myrina it was another searing afternoon, and as I gazed west across the sea pursuing the sun’s final moments, the sky grew orange bathing the foreshore park in Blakeian iridescence. I had sought relief in the park, its plants, trees and statues now illuminated by the spectacle. At the same time, this new light seemed to communicate a vision, or, perhaps more accurately, confirm an earlier recognition: that the wild and intoxicating dance endogenous to the Dionysian has been domesticated globally. In the glittering nightworld of dance the inter-corporeal delirium has been regulated by industry standards and copyright laws, strangled by a closing thicket of permit requirements, entertainment licenses and council by-laws, smothered by Public Order, Noise and Anti-Social Behaviour Acts and Quality of Life Taskforces; routed by brutal paramilitary style campaigns designed to kill the vibe. In the UK and around the world, following the feral days of acid house rave and the popularising of Ecstasy (or what would pass for MDMA), clubs were back in tight with the alcohol industry, and soundscapes in café-bars and retail outlets increasingly dictated by the ever-encroaching middle aged funk of RIAA approved and Phil Collins saturated net-radio stations like Sky FM: one station under God.

More Now

In a region with some of the largest mobile billboards on the planet—glacial class high speed ferry-boats featuring advertisements for Vodafone along their sides—the Northern Aegean is flooded with cellular phone consumption, echoing evidence of its growth around the globe. The ubiquity of mobile phone marketing in this region literally lifted me out of the water, and shed further light on the career of Dionysus.

As opposed to the disciplined world of Apollo, the Dionysian is recognised to be a carefree realm, outside or between rules, a space-time of wild abandon, play and immediacy, the merging of self with, and in, the Other. To be Dionysian is to live now, to be immortal, to “stay up forever” to revisit a mantra from the early rave scene—a scene which was also dedicated to making “now last longer.” As conveyed in ubiquitous advertisements for cell phones, and, for that matter, luxury cars or flash sportswear, making now last longer is more achievable today than ever before. And, the recurring sequence of images by which this promise is marketed? Youthfulness. The immediacy, and immortality, of youth. And perhaps, more to the point, a virtual youthfulness. In the hands of more and more citizens of the globe, more and more of whom thus become globalized, with the assistance of satellite communications technologies, cellular phones are a kind of possibility talisman. Potentiating instant communication, such devices enable owners to live more in the present than just yesterday, to be more spontaneous than you were last week, to be more youthful than when you were a kid. As the advertising campaign for a UK mobile phone sex-texting agency at SKY TV had it: “text fun... maybe more.” More. Always the promise of more.










The possibilities are made to seem endless—an orgiastic opening outwards as telco and cyber industries both invent and resolve the desire for more. Despite the increasing virtualization of interactions, technologies are designed to enable immediacy, like the mediated immediacy offered by Wi-Fi. Wearable media players, PDA’s and the Iphone, there are always new devices, newer models, with the latest firmwear, just around the corner, promising upgraded accessibility, improved interactability, permanent spontaneity, better living through satellites. In the millenarianism of satellite telecommunications discourse, such as that associated with GPRS and 3G networks offering “anytime/anywhere” access, being connected, fully-charged and powered-up amounts to possessing a global-selfhood, possessing data-potency, being “on” forever. In this climate, who wants to be a sedentary stay-at-home, inaccessible, un-networked and immobile? Who wants to be left behind? Unconnected, unrealized, virtually dead?

Of course, transforming military and commercial practice, essential for operating within competitive markets, for child rearing, for policing, for day-to-day work and living arrangements, virtual connectivity is driven by instrumental reasoning: by an Apollonian impulse. But it occurred to me that the ubiquity of cellular technology in particular is driven also by a Dionysian impulse. The mobile technology advertising industry has done its homework on the impulse for immortality, manipulating, and manufacturing, fears of obsolescence, of being left behind, and “off” the network. It manipulates the occidental terror of one’s own mortality. As a ubiquitous Dionysian engine, the mobile phone—together with an endlessly updated suite of plans and services marketed like a mongrel in Greece—has become emblematic of the desire for mobility, immediacy, and immortality; to “be together”, for being global, in the present.

Within a couple of decades, the Dionysian has broken its levees and flooded the public sphere, enabling one to be in permanent dialogue with more data, in touch with more people, be more mobile, more now, than ever before. The desire for the carnival, for entrancement, perhaps for what Roy Rappaport called “cosmic time”, has driven the development of communications technology (perhaps as much as practical and utilitarian motivations). But like the safety dance evinced by contemporary entertainment and lifestyle industries proliferating as a result of the control and regulation of the Bacchanal, the mobility of the Dionysian exemplified by mobile technology ubiquity and branded immortality, relies, in practice, upon its immobilization.

A brief odyssey through the contemporary career of Dionysus returns me to my original quest: the Island of Fire Festival on Limnos. With police restricting access to the island for the festival, Apollonian and Dionysian compulsions came to a head. The festival was disappointing for the development of psytrance in Greece. That said, Haris isn’t defeated. He says he’ll do it again, in a different place. With that kind of Herculian spirit, and courage, you know Dionysus has a chance.

Welcome to Wonderland is unique in the world of psy-trance documentaries. I’ve had the privilege of viewing a lot of psy-trance documentaries in recent times. Many are promotional – they are endorsements for event organisations or particular artists. Many are full of bravado, bristling with machismo and boasters embodied by DJs portrayed as shaman priests. But if shamanic consciousness is apparent in psy-trance, and quite a few propose that it is, it would be discovered right there on the dance floor: where egos are dissolved, limits trespassed and identities transformed. Like no other film on psy-trance culture Welcome to Wonderland penetrates this difficult membrane, exposes the organic machinery, and captures the heart of dance, or more specifically, the social characteristics of modern trance dance.

James Short’s film about the Melbourne psy-trance scene, a product of 6 years work, does not sell itself as an ethnographic film – but it passes as one nevertheless. And it does so because it is a grassroots film, dedicated in its pursuit of a milieu of people from various backgrounds and ages, through some of the most outrageous, intimate and self-annihilating moments of their lives. Recording comments and gesticulations with careful attention to detail cut to a fine sound track, the film enables participants to narrate their stories and allows viewers access to the ‘participation mystique’ momentarily transparent in the primal real estate between the speaker stacks at majestic bush and forest locations at Australia’s Rainbow Serpent and Earthcore Festivals. The film records a momentous locomotional transit into the new millennium at the Earthcore Millennial party at Lake Eildon. With a great score that includes work by Sugar and Ben Last, and an excellent series of dance montages and interviews, this film should not be missed by any trance enthusiast or indeed anyone interested in electronic dance music culture.

More about the film: and view the trailer:
Welcome to Wonderland

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Its June 2006, London.

A shift was in the making. I’d been staying at the Parallel Youniversity in West Hampstead for a month, while its Dean, Megatripolitan Fraser Clark, had been off on some Saharan adventure. This was hippy, or - as Fraser might have styled it - ‘zippy’, central. The first storey flat had a couple of decades worth of rave-olutionary activity pinned to its walls, the reminders of several East Asian and subcontinental tours adorning the eaves and immeasurable layers of grime and hair worked into its carpets. Apparently most of the hair belonged to Jonty, the dog, who I was tasked to mind, along with the world’s wildest indoor plant. While in the zippy lair, under the Hanging Gardens of Pronoia, I had privilege access to Fraser’s extensive countercultural library. Flying off the shelves was a book called Its Happening: a portrait of the youth scene today by J L Simmons and Barry Winograd (1966), a couple of hipper members of staff in Sociology Dept. at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

The book made me curious. As I became worded-up on ‘the hang-loose ethic’ of the ‘swingers’ and their definitive pursuit, ‘tripping out’, I got to thinking about the role of social researchers in making accounts of countercultures, and about why a ‘school’ of counterculture or alternative cultural ethnography had never developed paralleling say the Chicago School and its studies of gangs, or Birmingham’s Centre of Contemporary and Cultural Studies famed research on English working class youth subcultures. I’m sure there are numerous reasons, but perhaps the answers were facing me in the pages of this book. Besides an account of a tripping scene, in which the authors carefully absented themselves from any question of participation, the book was largely unreadable, woeful in parts – destined for obscurity. The sociological investigation of proto-hippies appears to have been constrained by the positivist and distanced discourse of mid-century social science. ‘It’ may have been ‘happening’ in the mid 1960s, but the methodological shift required to capture this, largely wasn’t. Given that ‘swingers’, freaks, anarchists, hippies and other counter-culturalists evinced ‘movements’ more than ‘subcultures’, they would be smothered under the dense theories of new social movement research, dissed by Marxists as middle class kids suffering from ‘affluent alienation’, deficient of historical or subaltern impulse, palmed off in Maslowian terms as those seeking the fulfilment of ‘advanced needs’, and derogated by spokespersons of the ‘monophasic consciousness’ prevailing as absconders, wasters and abusers of the rational mind and disciplined body.

So in my short semester at the Parallel Youniversity, I meditated on the scholarly detritus pre-Summer of Love, knowing that things hadn’t changed much almost ten years after the ostensible Second Summer of Love (1987). But the freakological path was discernable in the lifting fog. Itself owing much to ‘the sixties’ and its habitués commitment to become ‘experienced’, reflexive, to ‘be the revolution’ (both explicitly and implicitly through the wide circulation of consciousness alterants), the introspective and self-critical turn which would become integral to anthropology (by the 1990s) illustrates the kind of methodological ‘turn’ needed. As anthropologists have trained their sights on a range of non-traditional cultural movements, formations and practices, including the contemporary ‘happening’ apparent in a range of countercultural rituals, festivals and dance cultures, an ‘anthropology of experience’ appears to be the route to appropriate research practice.

Such preoccupations coincided with the imminent resumption of my ethnographic research on global dance culture – with a specific attention to trance (or psy-trance).

And this leads me to ‘Life’. That is, Life the festival in the Republic of Ireland. What better place to begin my summer research adventures, and to re-boot my life, after a depressing London winter. You see, in January I’d made the intercontinental cross-hemispherical shift from languid sub-tropical Brisbane and plugged directly into the Matrix: a 6th floor office in a steel, concrete and glass edifice known as the Social Science building at City University. I was a research assistant in the Sociology Department, and for three months I lived in a confined loft above an Indian dentist who, from his ground floor clinic, was drilling a serious hole in my bank account while volunteering for Iskcon in his spare time.

Perhaps I should have followed the lead of my Polish neighbours and fellow tenants, who wrought a split-cell apartment out of their shoebox, each with space for bunk beds and a TV. Or – and I’m nearly capitulating to a mounting cynicism here - I might have followed through with my original plans and moved in above a Pakistani operated youth fashion outlet north of The Angel: ‘Roughcut Casuals (Incorporating Young Folk)’. But like I said, it was early June, and the mist was lifting. My good mate Damo put me up in the basement room of his communist run share house in Stoke Newington - my base of operations for the next three months. No rent, no worries.

Life

I approached Life from the Hill of Tara on the road from Dublin towards Kells. And from the vantage of its mysterious earthen mounds regarded as the seat of the ancient High Kings, I scanned the horizon all around – for what it wasn’t clear: My Irish ancestors? A clear direction? A meaningful incorporation?


It felt good to be free of City (where I’d quit my job) and most excellent to be out of London – a monumental rat-cage in a burgeoning police state crumbling under the weight of resources funnelled into an infernal terror machine – a state apparatus which produces (they would argue ‘identifies’ and/or ‘eliminates’) terror/ists. I’d been suffocating. And so, with the benefit of the fresh air taken on these heights, I chose the SW route to Life – a psy-trance festival organised by Neutronix at Charleville Forest Castle near Tullamore for the full moon weekend of June 9-11 2006.


Charleville is a model gothic castle situated in a primordial oak wood. Built in the early 19th century, and undergoing restoration since the 1970s the castle is complete with dungeon, towers and parapets. The main sound stages (psychedelic vibes and world beats) were positioned on opposite sides of the castle each facing the immediate grounds, with the structure a remarkable context for sharp hued and psychedelic designs. Disappointingly, both stages were shut down as a result of sound complaints on the main night of the event, a circumstance which saw a small sound system operated by Kris Beckett (aka Acid Casualty) serve the morning fare in an alcove nearby.

The festival was especially marked by a Salvia Divinorum event, superceding previous experiences with this ‘teacher plant’ used for millennia by the Mazatec Indians of Oaxaca, Mexico, to divine spiritual truths. Observing my identity, memories, secrets, and body unfold and expand into my furniture, become undifferentiated from my surroundings, or recombine in a random tumble of the psyche, prior encounters were the ultimate in ludic experience: uncertain, turbulent, hilarious. Yet remarkably insightful for the cartoon-like Salvia spin cycle enables brief witness to the unconscious, exposing a world of mysteries beyond the rational (Salvia inspired art). While I regularly dived behind the reality curtain amidst the turbulence, consciousness always seemd to prevail. But with one bowl of Salvia 20x at Life, the game changed, and it changed dramatically. I went under …… for how long I wasn’t sure. Was I screaming? Was ‘I’ present at all? For how long had I been holding my breath?

Zipped inside my tent-womb in the shadow of Charleville, I finally remembered to breath. This surfacing was concurrent with a Category Five realisation that everything I had known, all my memories, my identity, the history of the world as I knew it, and my own physical body, was design, all code. In a duration where organic ‘time’ had receded and at a place where the veils were lifting this was acutely understood as a significant breach in the known. I understood the insight to be the exposure and collapse of a grand deceit - and there were those (coders perhaps) who wanted me to know it, who had been willing me out of the deception for a long time, to join the party, to roll with the momentum. Given the apparent unprecedented scale of the breach, the moment was critical. Awesome. The wild screams and clamour of the festival all around appeared like the confused and conflictual response of the coders to the awakening.

I heard many female voices during this episode, coming from around the festival site, seeming to will me out of my ‘life’ coma, ‘the great lie’. While the precise meaning of this deception was unclear, the sensation of immortality was overwhelming. And it was terrifying, as while an eternity was exposed –it was one in which I was absent. My being was not destined to comfortably terminate (with ‘death’) even though ‘I’ was. I had a glimpse across the Great Frontier – and I wasn’t there.

Upon reflection, and indeed this required much reflection, I recognised that this was an opening, an awakening, as incomplete as it was. The awakening enabling the played avatar of The Truman Show to become aware of ‘the game’ resonates here – not least since Truman's revelation precipitated the realisation that all he knew and believed in was about to end while life beyond ‘the show’ continued. And perhaps this awakening can be understood as something of the numinous experience characterised by Rudolf Otto as the Mysterium Tremendum. The problem with such episodes is that while we recognise them as awe-inspiring events, remarkable experiences, how do we assimilate such into our daily lives, when our culture (including ‘psychedelic culture’, as Eric Davis divines) does not provide us with such means? Perhaps it is this absence of incorporation which impels participants to revisit the awesome event, or attempt to re-live it, over and again, in order to ‘get the message’. The truth is that the significance of the experience, and most importantly, the thirst for further inquiry, will likely only arrive if one: a) is at a transitional moment in their life, and; b) performs requisite post-event work: debriefing, writing, relating the experience with fellow ‘travellers’. This is the entheogenic process. Herbs like Salvia will not orchestrate a transition. The response to its effects might.

What was previously understood to be an impenetrable frontier, an impossible crossing, was revealed as a fabrication maintained and defended against hacking. Despite the confusion discovered in the fjording, my Salvia assisted journey alerted me to a design. But this wasn’t just a revelation about death, but about life – that indeed the whole of my being was a construct (was designed). The mystery remains – who/what are the designers? What was the nature of the afterlife glimpsed? Will my life be lived out repeatedly? Were the celebrants those who had awakened before me? And perhaps most importantly, how does my experience compare with those of others encountered in this or similar liminal environments?

Fusion

While Life contextualised the reception of profound truths ‘now screening’ in the theatre of my mind, the next leg (following the Sunrise festival in Somerset) of this edge ethnography saw me land north of Berlin amidst an evolved off-planetary carnival. Thus, late June / early July and I found myself at the tenth anniversary of that jewel in the German counterculture, the Fusion festival. Reclaiming the former Soviet air base at Lärz, Fusion is a sprawling and ‘synergistic melting pot’ complete with twelve camouflaged hangars each used as performance, music and dance zones. Self-identified as ‘holiday communism’, the event doesn’t take itself too seriously. With 30,000 people, a black gyrocopter buzzing overhead from Fusion’s private airfield, Mad Maxian security vehicles with no two-way radios in sight and this is possibly the most unregulated event I’ve known. Verrückt!


Together with my friend Joe (who was calling himself Hans at this time), I’d been escorted here by Mattias, Simona and Natali, knowledgable, accommodating and delightful locals, guides to Deutchland’s recurrent freak city.

It’s Saturday night, the final night of the festival and it’s a definitive good vibe. The Turmbuhne (main floor) and the crew, organisers and other culture cosmonauts are launching into orbit. Hamburg pioneer Sven Dohse’s overseeing the show. It’s a different atmosphere from other floors and previous nights. Perhaps this is how a revolution is translated to a dance floor : the revolutionary excitement of reunification, when East Germany joined the democractic West and embraced capitalism with its assumed (and real) freedoms. Tonight, the party, which had begun all those years ago, continues. If the 1990s resembled the 1960s for Germany (especially East Germany), then is Fusion its Woodstock? It’s worth exploring. But whereas Woodstock and related events were an expression of rising disenchantment with Amerikkka, emerging in the wake of the momentous events of its time and accommodating machines of pleasure in the place of technologies of war and destruction, Fusion dramatises the folly of Germany’s past. Furthermore, it inherits more of the annual seasonal/festal tradition, perhaps akin to the Rainbow Gathering which emerged following the cultural struggles of the 1960s. But Rainbow is a socially and politically alternative event steeped in anarcho-social history (free festivals, alternative economy, permaculture, collectivism etc) and thus not an obvious influence on Fusion, which is very much a 1990s phenomenon – an expression of the techno music, performance and alternative theatre scenes flourishing in Berlin. Moreover, as a vast experimental site enabling the performance of innovative and exploratory techniques and art there is a professional amateurism to Fusion which has a charm all of its own.

Following Fusion I travelled into the west past Frankfurt. In the wake of the kindness shown to me by Natali, and the volunteers (Aleks, Danny and Emanuel) of the Alice Project who hosted me (Alice is a drug awareness group initiated by Wolfgang Sterneck) I headed towards a trance party close to Frieburg near the Schwartzwald (Black Forest) where the ISS (possible translation - Institute for Subliminal Schwartzwald) were holding ground against police to pull off their event despite the enforcement of massive sound restrictions. A small party and a close-knit trance tribe doing what they love: making dance party. Here I witnessed two practices entwined in the dance of the ages: the Dionysian impulse to make party, or as the Spiral Tribe had it, to make ‘a public new sense’, and; the Apollonian commitment to reign it in, to identify the ‘public nuisance’ and regulate it out of existence. Transgression thus has two sides. But the regulatory effort, the domestication of the night, and the attempt to purge transgression inspires feral sounds, enthuses the perennial noise from the margins, and even centres at the margins.

(Sundancer by Dakatz)








Boom

And speaking of such marginal centres, it wasn’t long before I found my way to Boom. On lake Idanha-a-Nova in the mountainous Beira Baixa region of NW Portugal, Boom is the world's premiere psy-trance festival. This year (from August 3-9) the biennial event expanded its scope to include a world music stage with a 'sacred fire' a la Rainbow Gathering style.
It was an innovative effort all round. The dj line-up was intentionally low key - in that they decided to go with artists who are largely non big ticket acts. There were approx 25,000 people in attendance, from 63 different countries. It was thus perhaps the most populated yet arguably least commercial trance festival on the planet. The Boom organisation is an evolved and sophisticated unit aware of their lineage (see for instance this chronology on their website) and keen to accommodate the breadth of styles (electronic and non electronic) identiying as ‘trance’. The various hard compromises and inclusions made for this event did not appear to detract from quality and experience. The main floor featured the Funktion One sound system, amplifying incredibly sharp sounds. Along with the entire assemblage of sound, visuals and performances, the primary Funktion of this ‘system’ was to engender an othering of the self, a process constituting an oscillating blend of self-annihilation and self-expression – right there in the primal real estate between the sound stacks, a landscape of becoming which, in the case of Boom extended well beyond the immaculate 2500m2 main floor shaded area with its irrigated water spray system, to the entire grounds of the week-long festival, a psyoasis in Portugal’s arid summer interior.

Event occupants clung to lake Idanha-a-Nova overlooked some 15 kms distant by the ancient mountain village of Monsanto. The lake was almost essential given the 40+ degree temperatures every day for the 7 day event. I only recall Outback Eclipse festival in Australia in 2002 reaching similar temperatures. Quite an ordeal really, especially when you consider many participants had to queue up on the first day in their cars for up to 17 hours in that kind of heat! But most people weren’t too pissed about it, or soon got over it - indeed it occasioned something of a collective endurance, a kind of extreme dance festival experience. At one of the most arduous dance pilgrimage sites on the planet - no pain, no gain, or something like that.

And there were many impressive elements to the festival, including an Eco Village promoting sustainability, using successful bio-tiolets and site wide recycling; the use of Balinese bamboo architectural designs for all the main structures (including the great Ambient floor tower structure which will remain as a permanent structure); a striking array of performances and land art installations; and many independent sound systems. But one of the more fascinating sites in this pilgrimage destination was the Liminal Village. Inaugurated in 2004 by Naasko, and the culmination of a vast global network of visionary groups, the space offers something rare in the world of psy-trance: an official forum for the exchange of ideas. A cerebral zone in a culture where the body has always taken precedence. As the name indicates, with its workshops, presentations and metacine cinema zone, the Liminal Village was an area devoted to the transmission of principal trance-culture sacra: ecology, shamanism, the 13 Moon Calendar and 2012, crop circles, psychedelic consciousness and ‘visionary culture’. The village was complimented by the Innervisions Gallery, the 13 Moon Temple, the Nectar Temple, the Solar Matrix Healing Zone, and a permaculture design garden.



I've an attraction to liminality, ‘the realm of pure possibility’ as maverick cultural anthropologist Victor Turner would have it. The term is derived from limen, Latin for ‘threshold’, and from ‘liminal’, which Arnold van Gennep understood as the central phase in a rite of passage. It is no surprise that the concept is attractive to anthropologists of dance such as my colleague Luis Vasconcelos, a PhD student of Portuguese trance culture, who is enthused by his countercultural Argonauts of Western Europe. The logic of the liminal phase, space or condition is that its occupants are temporarily between everyday rules and routines, a removed and licentious situation which potentiates subversive behaviour and new ways of living, a very attractive heuristic to those in pursuit of alternative futures, and thus a logic recognised by enablers like Naasko. At Boom, symbolic and stylistic recombinations flourish, core values are communicated and strangers commune in spontaneous conclaves. In a fashion, ‘magic happens’. This could be said to be true of the entire demarcated space of the festival, but here was a space for which its designers intended magic to happen.

Let me explain. This is a power spot. A space where neophytes and experienced habitués can meet fellow travellers, intergalactic missionaries, and seekers of alternate realities - of other (improved, enlightened) selves. In this primal real estate destinies collide, quirks of fate unravel, novelty events transpire. It might be said that the ‘magic’ element involves synchronicities, strange coincidences and other extraordinary events which are potentiated by an event design compelling like minded global participants to congress. If we can say that ‘coincidences’ appear to be enabled by the intelligent design of the space (into which many elements contribute), a purpose built storehouse of potential, a strange attractor, then we could say that ‘happenings’ (derided in line with the general derogation of hippies/the sixties by mainstream corporate culture as ‘weak’, ‘feminine’ or even ‘sold out’, or by other subcultures as non ‘hardcore’) are ‘magical’. Of course, ‘magic’, denotes circumstances and practices not explicable via positivism, nor replicated via the scientific method and thus not accorded ‘truth’ status. But time and again, one experiences phenomena inexplicable via rational lenses but from which significant personal ‘truths’ derive. Perhaps the rationalist approach to this is to suggest that with the evolved preparations of events (parties) the greater likelihood for extraordinary experience, visions, encounters etc, which might explain why the trance party is such a popular global experience to which participants repeatedly return – seeking enlightenment, awareness, meaning, belonging, love, truth.

My thinking about this was stimulated by an experience which effectively knocked me sideways. It happened about mid Boom, in the heat of the day, and it happened in the Liminal Village. Days before I’d had my galactic signature read by the exotic, vivacious and articulate Kwali. I had been reminded that I was a yellow planetary seed. As with 6 years before, when I first had my ‘galactic signature’ read, I guess I didn’t give it a great deal of credence – I was more interested in the flourishing of the Mayan calender/13 Moon movement, as a movement which develops independently from my own biography – as a rational observer of cultural movements. So, days later, after my friend Paris introduced me to Chiara, an Italian whose conducting independent research on trance culture, something extraordinary happened. Chiara conveyed her interest in the 2012 movement and her Mayan Calendar galactic signature. It’s not something I've had revealed often, especially so enthusiastically, but of the 260 combinations, hers was identical to mine! Like traffic colliding at a cosmic intersection.... Boom! ... there you are careering through the windscreen into a newly coloured reality. Down at the village crossways, betwixt and between, a special belongingness was discovered, and it made sense. Did someone say It's happening?

So my fellow ‘expander’, Chiara Baldini, spoke of trancers of ages past, of the Maenads and the Rites of Eleusis with which she holds psy-trance parties to be continuous. From all that I’ve experienced of the genre, of the pilgrimage, of the ordeal, of the othering of the self, the revelatory experience, there is much to this interpretation. For one thing, while many European sonic pilots cruising the theta waves take recourse to ‘tribal’ cultures (e.g Aboriginal, Mayan, Native American etc) or Eastern religions (Hinduism, Buddhism) to frame or articulate their flight paths, this perspective demonstrates that their othering is perhaps rooted in a cultural heritage closer to home.

Boom was a fitting end to a long hot European summer of experiential ethnography. From Ireland to Portugal, I had transcended impossible frontiers and experienced encounters extraordinary. And as I had privileged meetings with a multitude of inspirational artists, producers, enablers and participants of psy-trance culture in a range of countries, friendships formed and my ‘field’ expanded in ways I hadn't foreseen.





























Many thanks to thehospages, Magnetrixx, Sergio, Spacedracula, Birthmarkleg and for images used here.

Photo by Vapours
Photo by Superblasta
Photo by digitalex









I recall reading on the refreshingly irreverent psyreviews.com about an unconfirmed report that the former Portuguese colony of Goa was considering renaming itself ‘Progressive’. It’s an intriguing quip, reflecting current anxieties over the rampant marketing of counter-cultural communitas and the formulaic standardisation of a sound (distributed as ‘Goa Trance’) that now more accurately evokes a Fruitopia commercial, than the new spiritual experiments around Anjuna village way back in the day - such that the experience in Goa might now effectively approximate a … well, Fruitopia commercial, or a kind of ‘freak Club Med’, as Erik Davis would have it.

While the renaming of the exotic locale in the East which gave birth to an electronic music juggernaut now convulsing with sub-genres, neo-styles, fluid labels and more DJ name changes than can be tracked by the human eye, might capture the ambience of the particularly cosmopolitan sophistication of a dance music scene with counter-cultural pretensions, what would we relabel the Indian state in a further five years? Will ‘Progressive’ still be progressive?

The issue of commercialised communitas aside, the quip evokes an underlying dilemma. That is, while sound might evoke sensations similar to the original experience, may even be engineered in efforts to reproduce it, and party goers might seek to recapture the original experience, sound doesn’t tend to be experienced in exactly the same way again.

Photos by Vapours
Though this seems the case for all musical experience, a ‘progressive’ music is a (sub)cultural recognition of this tendency. To become committed to the progressive experience, literally living on the edge of the progression – where nothing remains the same – is to commit to a lifestyle as ephemeral, perpetually upgradeable and permanently unfinished as the intended character of the sound.

Seeking the edge involves journeying to transgressive margins, especially international psy-trance festivals, where transgression is the context for progression. Having danced on the verge, for the experienced this ‘otherworld’ becomes likened to a pilgrimage destination, a centre out there sought by the those who’ll board the Psy-Trance Express (I’m reminded of DJ Krusty’s so-named van here), make sacrifices, endure ordeals and wear outlandish pants in order to re-obtain it.

While ‘progressive’ is (arguably) impossible to capture due to its necessarily shifting audiotronics, and variable interpretation, I’ve recently encountered something of a rock in the quicksands of the present, a mountain range towering above the arctic tundra of Goa trance, the wastelands of ‘full on’ and much of which now holds ‘Progressive’ pretensions – a veritable Gibraltar of the genre. You can’t deny the body’s desire to respond with the wildest trouser-splitting gesticulations known to human-kind. Blue Planet Corporation’s (Gabriel Masurel) Cosmic Dancer performed this trick on me and, unlike my pants, should withstand the intense pressures of time and interpretation (well, perhaps a couple of years) marking a ‘novelty wave’ in the progression. This will be the soundtrack of a remake of Dr Seuss’s The 5,000 Fingers of Dr T. Or it should be. Performed in the right context, such functional dreamsonics, familiar yet novel, effect a strange gnosis. And such was the experience of the uncanny enveloping me in Paradise Canyon on the fast flowing Koprulu Canyon River near the Mediterranean city of Antalya in Southern Turkey for Soulclipse, a celebration of the eclipse, when, as Hallucinogen appeared to have flicked the switch, the sun was engulfed by the moon and Venus burned bright in the clear mid-afternoon sky. A three minute cosmic snapshot, the dark flash of which left an indelible imprint on the thousands of naked retinas belonging to the howling massive (around 7-8000 people) - all the weirdest kids in the classroom.

Photo by deadreamer

Photo by Clive. Photo by Kata

When a hail storm had collapsed the Soulclipse main stage on Monday afternoon just before the opening ceremony was due to begin, what appeared to be a disaster was eventually turned around. Quite miraculously, nobody was seriously injured. While it didn’t look good at that point, praise must be handed to the organisers, the Indigokids, since after major logistical challenges and set times gone into orbit, the main stage was operational by Friday night. In the meantime, the Liquid stage and chill – a lush area on the river, graced by a gallery of amazing art works and tall luminescent mushrooms - were pulsing. Given the many difficulties holding an event of this kind and magnitude in this location, my hat’s off to the Indigokids for building the context for the vibe.

Photo by Marc






Photo by deadreamer

And this brings me back to my rather indulgent tangent. The Zen phrase ‘nothing remains the same’ indicates that the trance experience is as much about permanence as it is about movement. There appears to be a deep-seated paradox at work here. Perhaps the closest we might get to resolving this is demonstrated by the commitments of those who rise from their deep-seatedness and gravitate in numbers to

aesthetically evolved nodes of progression manifesting at the earthly junctures of major celestial events across the globe. And perhaps the nearest and most eloquent designation for the optimum experience sought within what is a largely non-textual and non-vocal socio-sonic space (i.e. the dance floor), is the phrase identifying an experience most recognise but are hard pressed to articulate any further: the good ‘vibe’. These parties reconstitute the sixties ‘vibe’ in what is possibly its most evolved contemporary state (regardless of whether Vibrasphere is playing). Having made transit to such sites of ineffability at remote locations in a fashion resembling the now mythical Goa Full Moon parties, habitués will camp on the edge of the progression, remastering themselves under the pressure of the bass. At least that’s the potential, for these are uncertain realms pregnant with possibility – digital-chemical interfaces whose outcomes cannot be predicted. Emersed in black light baths and probed by laser light, undone by the crankingest sounds of unreleased ‘acid’, even as sensoriums are aswamp in liquid LSD, the interfaced and off-their-faced yield to the threshold, potentially re-programmed in the mix.




Photo by Marc

Photo by Vapours

In a place where everything potentially unravels, nothing happens. Perhaps this explains why the experienced labrats of these digital-chemical laboratories are troubled describing – and maybe don’t seek to describe - what they’ve experienced (beyond statements of ‘avin it’, being ‘out there’, going ‘crazy’, ‘mad’ or in near-heroic tales of munterment). And perhaps this in part also explains why trance critics are so disapproving of the apparent vacuous, empty and ‘non-politically’ progressive characteristics of psy-trance. Is Progressive little more than a treadmill? Trance festivals psychedelic theme-parks? Mindless escapades? Given the branded bottling and resale of ‘experience’ as Trance (btw. participants were required to sacrifice up to 180 euros before entering Souldclipse), you can’t ignore the criticism, but there is something wearing about the moralism in the motives of detractors, replicating in some ways those who’ve mobilised against subcultural contexts for accessing alternative states of consciousness, who’ve sought to eliminate or domesti cate the ‘savage trance’ (a term attributed to researcher of Brazilian and African trance rituals, Roger Bastide, in Frank Gauthier’s translation in his chapter in Rave Culture and Religion), triggering epidemics of puritan self-discipline along the way.
Photo by digitalex

In the language of Tony D’Andrea, who also contributed to that book, the abandonment of rational mind states might involve an ‘oceanic eroticism’ enabled by MDMA, and/or a psychedelic asceticism’ facilitated through LSD and other entheogens. And with the addition of ganja, alcohol (from beer to absinthe) and ketamine, the seas are rarely calm. Sailing towards the edge of the known universe where cosmic love and personal derailment are reported, the trance-massive want their MTV (mindscape trance vacation).

For those who hear the noise but cannot feel the music, it will seem unfathomable that the ‘singularity’ could be obtained amidst the carnivalsque bustle of the dance floor, seemingly as unfeasible as the prospect of achieving enlightenment at Burger King. But these hyper-liminal landscapes of (un)becoming and heterotopias of serious fun are thresholds to which the experienced will, as circumstances allow, gravitate time and again, anticipating and perhaps even achieving, nothing. Permanent-neophytes, they are travellers who, in a fashion consistent with those populating what D’Andrea calls the transnational techno ‘freak-scape’, do not move. Perhaps it’s just this promise of an indescribable familiarity, that drives these vibe-fanatics to converge from points across the globe – like Israel, Japan, Russia, Italy, Brazil, Sweden, Poland, Peru, Spain - since for them, nothing is sacred.

Photo by Robin
In revisiting such an experience, trancers relive a time-out-of-time frame so often reported to parallel the experience of ancestral forebears who, if traced back far enough, are believed common to all (as far back at least as those high times when primitives enjoined effervescent happenings in Day Gloed torsoes). An ongoing commitment, the party constitutes a cosmic housekeeping ritual, ultimately ensuring that nothing does in fact remain the same.

Photo by Vapours
The total solar eclipse psy-trance festival, Soulclipse, was such a return. Many had stepped through space and time from previous eclipse festivals like Outback Eclipse in South Australia in Dec 2002 (I travelled from Istanbul and camped with one of the makers of the documentary film The Outback Eclipse Story, Gareth Moon). Perhaps this was because many of the pilgrims to Turkey were indeed Australians, trancers recruited along the way, fixated by this strange attractor lying somewhere between the speaker stacks when heavenly bodies and the earth are in correct alignment.

It takes planning, resources and a good social support base to potentiate abandonment. Campsites and campfires are nexus points for exchange and support – like that provided by the crew I travelled and camped with in Turkey, establishing a good base in the field near the top of the valley. After a chance meeting with Paris (operator of Australia’s Psyclone Events) in Istanbul’s Saltanahmet district, I hooked up with a posse of mostly Australians and New Zealanders all making the journey south. Van loads of black sheep – and over the course of the ensuing days, there were more than a few loose in the top paddock. These weren’t ‘Slippers and Pipe Trance’ types. More Gum Boot Psy - hardcore mercenaries.

Photo by digitalex

Possibly the biggest Aussie (and Kiwi) landing since Gallipoli (around 700 Australians present and most of those from Melbourne), and we still got annihilated attempting the heights . But if it was a sacrifice, the cause had nothing to do with national identity, but a desire to abandon desire and identity. Commanded by the bass, called by the melody lines orchestrated by the likes of FReq and Echotek, comrades in arms, legs and utility belts crossed into No Man’s Land. At the Liquid floor on the night of the eclipse (Wednesday March 29), as camp fires dotted the valley, I sacrificed the flesh on the soles of my feet and toes for the rhythm. Old hands Atmos and Ticon had prepared the build throug h the afternoon. From dusk onwards, D-Tek, Onyx, Par a Hula, Hyper Frequencies and other unknowns (since the set times had gone awol), combined to form the most wonderfully sustained sonic assault I’ve ever experienced. Misshapen bodies caught in laser lig ht, smoking torsoes here, a stray foot there, we were pinned down by precision programming. Bandaged and battered, two nights later Echotek rallied me out of the trenches towards the edge of the progression. And I was not alone. Amongst Turkish comrades, many of whom seemed to have ventured out of Antalya on Saturday night for the final push, we passed into the whirring rhythm, and were taken to pieces. Shrieks of exhilaration could be made out over the driving beats. Photo by Superblasta

Capitulation was complete.

Photo by Kata

Photo by Kata

Photo by Marc

Thanks to Superblasta, deadreamer, Digitalex, kata, Marc, Mfractal, Michinio, Robin and Vapours for all the eyecatching images. Tristan White has an excellent and amusing photo and video journal), and MALEX has great shots (see Performance section especially).

Come celebrate the San Francisco launch of the Journeybook, the world's best psychedelic anthology. A private warehouse party @ 1286 Folsom St. San Francisco CA 94103 on Sat Aug 8th from 730pm – late (afterparty at nearby venue). Featuring book launch and author readings by Rak Razam and Tim Parish and a Psychedelic Salon panel discussion by leading experts, including Rick Doblin from MAPS, live electronic music, art gallery space and more.

To reserve your place now for this private event, Paypal US $15 for entry, or US $35 for entry plus a signed copy of the book (which you can pick up on the night) to: paypal@undergrowth.org by clicking here.

A portion of the door proceeds go towards MAPS research on medical psychedelics.

Price: $15.00

http://www.thejourneybook.com/events

I am very pleased to announce the publication of my new book:

Technomad: Global Raving Countercultures
(Graham St John, Equinox, 2009)

A cultural history of global electronic dance music countercultures, Technomad explores the pleasurable and activist trajectories of post-rave culture.

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

Book description:

The book documents an emerging network of techno-tribes, exploring their pleasure principles and cultural politics. Attending to sound system culture, electro-humanitarianism, secret sonic societies, teknivals and other gatherings, intentional parties, revitalisation movements and counter-colonial interventions, Technomad investigates how the dance party has been harnessed for transgressive and progressive ends – for manifold freedoms. Seeking freedom from moral prohibitions and standards, pleasure in rebellion, refuge from sexual and gender prejudice, exile from oppression, rupturing aesthetic boundaries, re-enchanting the world, reclaiming space, fighting for “the right to party,” and responding to a host of critical concerns, electronic dance music cultures are multivalent sites of resistance.

Drawing on extensive ethnographic, netographic and documentary research, Technomad details the post-rave trajectory through various local sites and global scenes, with each chapter attending to unique developments in the techno counterculture: e.g. Spiral Tribe, teknivals, psytrance, Burning Man, Reclaim the Streets, Earthdream. The book offers an original, nuanced theory of resistance to assist understanding of these developments. This cultural history of hitherto uncharted territory will be of interest to students of cultural, performance, music, media, and new social movement studies, along with enthusiasts of dance culture and popular politics.

Contents

1. Introduction: The Rave-olution?
2. Sound System Exodus: Tekno-Anarchy in the UK and Beyond
3. Secret Sonic Societies and Other Renegades of Sound
4. New Tribal Gathering: Vibe-Tribes and Mega-Raves
5. The Technoccult, Psytrance and the Millennium
6. Rebel Sounds and Dance Activism: Rave and the Carnival of Protest
7. Outback Vibes: Dancing Up Country
8. Hardcore, You Know the Score

Available from Equinox
and amazon.com

More reviews

“Technomad offers important insights into the meeting points between countercultural discourses and post-rave techno cultures. Optimistic regarding the progressive potential of outdoor techno-trance gatherings, this well-documented study traces the complex genealogy of a global nomadic ‘technoccult’, with emphasis on Europe, North-America and Australia. Not to be missed by anyone interested in the study of rave cultures, countercultures and festivals.”
Dr Hillegonda Rietveld, Reader in Cultural Studies, London South Bank University

“A critical utopianism is articulated and celebrated with a textual energy too rare in today’s cultural studies. Graham St John is wide-eyed in order to look more closely. I recommend his shining and grubby doofscape to all interested in the radical possibilities and limitations of contemporary culture.”
Professor George McKay, University of Salford

Photo: Ronnie Simulacrum


You have to travel a long way up river to find him.

So far above the headwaters there’s barely a trickle. Under the withering south-eastern Australian sun in January, under the direct pressure of quality sound, in that primal real estate between the speaker stacks on Monday afternoon, on the Market Floor, Rainbow Serpent Festival. It doesn’t get much better than this. And somewhere, amid all that optimising, under all that tweaking of sophisticated hardware, in a vibrant undergrowth of bronzed bodies and baked wet ware, the Colonel is getting his freak on. This is not the bird-frying Colonel of take-out restaurant fame. He’s not your rank and file denizen of the trance floor. Somewhere in this theatre of the absurd, this paddock of pizzazz, this cavalcade of crank, the highest, rankest and most de-commissioned officer in the PLA (the Psychedelic League of Australasia), Colonel Kurtz, is at large.

It’s Australia Day weekend 2009, and I’m attending the nation’s psychedelic carnival: in all likelihood the funkiest dance festival on the planet. They’d made expeditions from across the country, and around the world, for the 12th annual Rainbow. I’d driven down from Brisbane, some 2,000 kilometres north. Via Coonabarabran near the Warrumbungle Ranges, through Dubbo and Deniliquin, I rode astride the long Barren Highway, over a landscape scorched by an unprecedented heatwave. Near Parkes I made passage through Bogan Gate and somewhere near West Wyalong drove into a freak storm, lifting as quickly as it set in.
The following day, Murray River ghost gums guided me home around Echuca way as my 75 series Land Cruiser crossed into Victoria, making for the town of Beaufort, west of Ballarat, the locale of the Mother of all Doofs.

Photo: Web Grrl: ozdoof.com

Arrived near midnight, two days before the event’s official kick-off. 500 people were already on site, so it took some effort the following morning to locate Krusty. An altered statesman and luminary of the scene, he’d found some shade and began making camp – good thing, as by 10:30 AM the heat was making my blood crawl. Beginning with a shrine Krusty set against a tree, over the next day or two, the camp became a loose network of vans and tarps, peopled by a largely Melbourne based techno-cognoscenti. Adjacent, a non-intrusive independent sound system spilled warm tunes and mashups over my daily iced fruit loops.

Over the next couple of days the festival expanded like an inflatable tropical aquarium. More than 11,000 people eventually poured on site, a flourish of vibrance, colour and sound replenishing a punished land. With five stages hosting sounds and performances from straight-up progressive psychedelic trance to dub reggae, along with a Lifestyle Village (large workshops zone), Transformational Area (natural therapy) and Kid’s Zone, Rainbow Serpent has gained respect in the global alternative dance calendar.

Mirror ball fetishes sway from the trees of countless campsites like devotions to the Age of Disco-very. Tribal ensigns, entheogenic art and black light beacons are raised on and above this temporary sonicity whose inhabitants are infected by a wicked and knowing laughter. All around the site, curious sculptures, funny lights and cool interactive installations have appeared, perhaps none more impressive than a pyramidal structure called the LightScraper (check the video here) built by ENESS in a paddock.

LightScraper by ENESS

While the festal ambiance is fed by popular cultural imports (a small tribe of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles among them), local origins and mythologies are respected too (the story of the Rainbow Serpent chief among them). With traditional owner Uncle Ted Lovett leading the opening ceremony with his customary Welcome to Country, there was no doubting where I was. And as indigenous music, art and culture (Dugong cooking workshops, performance) danced in strange synchronicity with non-indigenous Australiana, illuminated by the flames of Robin Mutoid's fire organ, we were living an animate mythology.

Photo: Ben Dixon

Photo: Dallas Casey

Last sighted in these parts a year ago, Kurtz was inside the animation. The man who was “banned” from ConFest, the alternative lifestyle festival started by Jim Cairns back in 1976, which, by the 1990s, evolved into Australia’s premiere alternative gathering.

I’d first attended ConFest for New Year’s 1993/94, becoming so captivated that I returned 13 times, leaving finally in 1999 having completed a PhD thesis in anthropology on ConFest (part conference and part festival) and its organizing body, the Down to Earth Co-operative Society (DTE). In those early years of my attendance the event alternated between bends on the Murray River near Moama (at New Years ) and Tocumwal (at Easter).

Mutoid Waste Co Beetle Mantice at ConFest’s Teknow Village doof, New Year 1996/97

This was pre-invasion, according to the stalwarts of authenticity defending their beachhead from raving interlopers and the possibility of the newspaper headline "Five young teenagers dead at 'Go to Heaven in 1997 Spiritual Festival'". The pre-emptive headline expressed the fears and the fantasies of Les Spencer who distributed a document around DTE in 1996 instructing Confesters on the neo-sonic demonics of techno music. It all started with the arch-nemesis of old farts, none other than DJ Krusty, who in Easter 1995 teamed up with the Ci-Cada sound system detonating Goa Trance down town ConFest to the chagrin of inhabitants unsettled by the Vooor Vooor Vooor Vooor propagating across the billabong and upending their asanas. The following year, Krusty attempted to shift the doof to the DTE Winter Solstice Gathering. But his efforts to obtain approval (and funding) were hampered by DTE, which, under the ministrations of defender of "the ConFest spirit" David Cruise, ruled that the event's postered image of psilocybin compromised ConFest's reputation as a "family" event.

The doof that never was

For those seeking a place for the doof outside the ConFest city-limits, the negation was disingenuous. The oldies appeared to be behaving more like over-sized children than wise elders. It was Krusty vs Crusty. And the cultural war would begin with earnest. By Easter 1997, the Doof at the Murray river site near Moama, a collaboration of Krusty's TeKnow village and the Metamorphic Ritual Theatre Company's Labyrinth, took place on the most elevated part of the site, where all were subjugated by the beats. When, with horn honking, director-turned-vigilante, Laurie Campbell, drove onto the dance floor intending to tow away the generator, the theatre was in full swing. But when someone reached in, snatched his car keys and chucked them into the Murray River, the doofers declared that they weren’t going quietly.

When, in the next act, Laurie returned holding a hatchet with which he intended to stab the beast (the generator) in the belly, he was gang-tackled, brought to ground, and dispossessed of his prop (by none other than Robin Mutoid - who then lobbed it in the river). But while Laurie was prevented from hacking into the 3-phase generator cable (and likely electrocuting himself), under Cruise control, with the support of Spencer and an anarcho-gerontocracy, DTE would oversee the axing of the doof menace, despite efforts by the likes of Joe Stojsic, another of my Rainbow campmates, to augment a compromise in a techno-acoustic "village" he called "Hybrid". With more than an echo of Nancy Reagan, as the signature file of one detractor had it: “Just Say No to Techno”. In this climate, voting blocks of those identified as ConFest Negator Tribalists (or CNTs) slashed funding to techno digital arts, psychedelic culture and forest activism. Amid the boundary maintenance was Kurtz, who once held a series of unobtrusive Psychedelic Spirituality workshops at ConFest, becoming the subsequent target of a bizarre hate campaign. Public enemy numero uno.

With his photo pinned at the entrance over successive ConFests, the gossip moved faster than a fire front on Back Saturday, and even more toxic. Amid dark fantasies of village water supplies spiked with acid, sexual abuse, and innocents abducted by techno-terrorists, a scapegoat for all the imagined dangers bedeviling their retirement village, Kurtz was bound, packed with the community’s nightmares, and driven off into the Never Never. A flaccid Cruise was seen parading at subsequent ConFests in a body painted flight suit under a banner which could have read "Mission Accomplished".

But what’s this? Surviving the Department of Justice (who had appointed an administrator to DTE in 2001), here they were, Cruisy and Les - out here in Never Never Land. The two most responsible for "saving ConFest" by carefully manufacturing, and leading crusades against, its enemies, stepping into the land of nod, nod, nod, nod. Over ten years later, I guess they came to see where everyone went. I meet Dave and Les in the workshop area late Sunday. The former sitting quietly nursing a video camera and carrying the kind of weariness I imagine one acquires scanning the horizon for spooks. Wearing earplugs, with no music amplified within the proverbial Coooeeeeeeee, Les delivers a 20 minute monologue on his recently completed PhD on what he calls the Laceweb. What are they seeing here, I wonder. And what are they hearing?

Col Kurtz and the Gesticulations

Photo: Sensesmaybenumbed

A Kingswood ute reverses slowly towards the Market floor. In its tray, couches hold raucous team-mates barracking for spirit. And their view? It's nothing short of sensational. Early afternoon and six thousand people are being dumped by long swells of funk. My woggle fully toggled, I bob across the sparkling sea on this longest of Mondays. That outfit from Cairns sharing their fleshy membrane with this crew from Doncaster East. Those bogans from Ballarat merging with these travelers from Israel, and those two recurring cute girls from Japan ... they are eternal. I make mid-floor interception with a cluster of marijuana plants offering the most organic decor in memory.


Familiar faces emerge from the deep. Rusty, I haven't seen for years, his scout uniform bristling with activist and esoteric insignia. Nano, a real life Drop Bear hunting action figure, lounges on his game, finding patterns in the chaos. A Norwegian goddess whose name I knew not but whose smile I knew well shouts stories of some other event on another continent. The illustrious gonzoloid Rak Razam, who with artivist-at-large, Tim Parish, had launched The Journeybook, a collection of entheogen-inspired narratives and imagery, on site. Holding an umbrella against the sun, under crown and in familiar tie-died uniform, the resplendent King Richard holds court in this federation of fedoras. And abandoning his command on the heights above the Market Floor, the Colonel himself now draws up among us, raising his side arms with uncanny precision, grinning under bass pressure, gesticulating in tongues.

And as I gaze to the right of stage ... there they are. A short squat figure and a taller man with grey beard. It's Cruisy and Leso, standing back beyond the stage, thin lipped at the spectacle. I imagine that they are staring directly at me. They are staring at me. At us! I wave, gesturing that they join me, join us, in this rare place under the sun.

Vooooooor Voooor Vooooooor Voooor.......

But like zoo patrons populating the safety margins beyond the primate enclosure, flâneur inspecting the contents of a terrarium, they are standing outside the vibe. They weren't intending to dive into these exotic waters off the Cape of Good Vibes. They were having none of it. Perhaps this is a case, as George Carlin once observed, that "those who dance are considered insane by those who cannot hear the music". Perhaps they're archonic inspectors searching for the WMDs they're certain are here. Sappers acquiring co-ordinates for a fire-strike? I don’t know, but the grooveless armada vanish into the haze as we warm to the synaesthetic currents in which we're immersed. And as I come about to an electronic funk quaking with tremors, turns and bombastic vocal samples, I know this isn't ConFest anymore. And, incidentally, it also isn't a European psytrance festival where intrepid adventurers are tasked to scale the summit of the progression. Under the relentless southern sun, amid techno-ferals and raving mates heir to a thousand backyard BBQs and a million corroborees, we are mounting a progression all of our own.

Photo: Ronnie Simulacrum

Photo: Beautiful Wwworld

Canadian puppet master Mathew Jonson is now conjuring a tech-tonic storm, the platform built throughout the morning by the likes of Reality Pixie, Sun Control Species, and Sensient, the salviated aural animatronics of the former (Darren Smith) benchmarked by his driving Schnickschnick which caused a sensation if for nothing more than the carefully crafted samples evoking psychedelic bogans of the third kind descending among, and getting up, us. Saddled up, and divining the spirit amid a groove intoxication that was growing phatter by the hour, the man of stainless steel, the Swedish Chef, held his Nangerator - the Whipped Meme Dispenser - aloft. Repurposed widely as a means of inhaling the compressed contents of nitrous oxide bulbs (or nangs), the gourmet whipped cream machine is a tool for assisting the gnosis, accessing the mysteries, downloading the shit.

Out here, the Nangerator is in high demand, for the mysteries are nigh and the Pope of Nitrous is calling in the reserves. On this Aussie Day weekend, in the strange wake of the NO2 assaying of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William James, and Ken Kesey, the dance floor might be a football field, the footie a nang drop-punted through the posts ... and the Rainbow dream team captain? Why, it's Kurtz.

The Kernel of Truth

To speak of progression is to speak of mystery - that which compels action, which motivates the sacrifice of energy in the pursuit of spirit. Gathering strength, we're at a significant site of the mysteries provoking and channeling spirit in all of its forms. And I say "we" since it is inside the optimised vibe where a multitude of individuals holding unique life stories, and pathways into this day, onto this space, may transcend their uniqueness by the most historically evolved means – that is, by dancing with others in a space-time which is remote, temporary and vertical. Such logistics enable a simultaneity of singularity and theatricality, evident in the rites of the Dionysian Mystery cults of Ancient Greece, and in the corroborees performed for scores of millennia in these lands by the Wathurwurrung and Djarwarrung. Since at least the 1960s and 1970s, alternative festivals have offered a means by which this logic (edge + brief + high = wow) has been adopted, resurrected, and, more recently, remixed.

Photo: Ronnie Simulacrum

And so you once had ConFest, an event whose cooperative framework, whose grassroots anarchist principles, enabled its social organicism and its "spirit". ConFest's spiritual ethos reveals a desire to remain free from possessive materialism, at the same time enabling experimentation with a multitude of alternative discourse and practice within its borders. This was a serious alternative cultural investment since 1976, and in the early to mid 1990s ConFest was a hot-house of ideas: permissive, exciting, diverse. But with nepotism, bigotry and CNTs characterising and populating Down to Earth, its event grew insular and, to the frustration of many, pointless.

Commentators have held that DTE's cooperative ethos made for a more open, virtuous and authentic event. But early in the new millennium, ConFest had transformed into a remarkably closed phenomenon, many of its innovators and activists ran out of town by possessive sheriffs. The Colonel was only one of these outlaws, although perhaps the most spectacular. With an early incarnation at the Tocumwal ConFest at Easter 1996 - where Krusty dubbed the doof village "Rainbow Dreaming" - The Rainbow Serpent Festival is a commercial enterprise. But it has evolved into an alternative carnival unparalleled in Australia, save perhaps for the Exodus festival. Its roots in electronic music, specifically psychedelic trance, colours its trajectory, as does its capacity to accommodate outlaws, the outraged, and the outrageous. Rainbow Serpent is much more than an electronic music festival. For one thing, music styles are diversifying. More widely, a commitment to support a local alternative arts scene, and host sustainable practices and indigenous culture within its precincts reveals a growing vision. More importantly, Rainbow Serpent, and a variety of smaller local event-crews, are vehicles for the evolution of a hybridized doof arts scene that, from its inception, has been sensitive to ecology and indigeneity, ceremony and celebration. And with support given for the augmentaton of its Opening and Closing Ceremonies, ConFest never had such an indigenous spirit.

Opening Ceremony Parade. Photo: Alicia Flanders


Closing Ceremony

The End of the Rainbow

Writing on West African possession cults, anthropologist Steven Friedson comments that in Africa "who you are often has as much to do with how you dance.” The statement offers some insight for Rainbows, but it may not be how you dance by comparison to others but that you dance with others. Here “possession” seems more intersubjective despite the fact that there are no universally identifiable deities or spirits of "possession". This is the terrain of the vibe, and it seems fair to say that, however you may struggle to describe it, the vibe cannot be experienced at home alone. At the thick end of the Rainbow, vibrating in its refracted hues, an optimised state of being together with others enables our encounter with the Other, including our other selves. These transpersonal states may provoke revelations about the universe and questions about our place in it, or they may confirm a spectrum of visions.

Yes, we were seeking answers and finding questions in this open classroom under the Southern Cross. And if there was a clear affirmation resonating as the orange disk slid beneath the western horizon, as traditional owners closed the festival under didj, drums and burning eucalyptus, in response to the Hendrixian question remixed in Sphongle's debut release Are You Shpongled?, it was as if we were declaring …. “yes, we are”.

And yes we are. The words I heard escape from the lips of the good Colonel as he was being shredded by electronic machetes.

"the colours . . . . . . . . . . . . . . the colours"


Tim and Rak strapped in on the launch pad of The Journeybook .... This is Houston, come in 13.....


Photo: Dallas Casey

Thanks to Sally, Paris and Jay and their Five Star couches, the photographers for their eye, Callum and Robin Mutoid for their valued feedback, Krusty for inspiration, Kurtz for his Being, and the many-coloured people of the Rainbow.