Monday Too Far Away: Rainbow Serpent Fest 09

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.

12 Noon, Black Rock City

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.

Rhythm Nation: Jamaica

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

Serpentine ODDySEA: From Keilor East to the Goomburra Valley

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.

Begoggled in the Mega-Vibe: Burning Man

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.

A Passport to Zionysus: Travels in Israel's Autonomic Zones

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

Holy Rave: the greatest rave that never happened

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.