Thursday, November 19, 2009

Technomad: Global Raving Countercultures


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

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

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

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

Book description:

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

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

Contents

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

Available from Equinox
and amazon.com

More reviews

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

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

Thursday, October 01, 2009

Dancecult Journal Launched


The first edition of Dancecult, a peer-reviewed, open-access e-journal for the study of electronic dance music culture (EDMC), is now live, with downloadable PDFs.

Dancecult 1.1 2009 Contents:


Editor's Introduction Graham St John

Featured Articles

IDM as a "Minor" Literature: The Treatment of Cultural and Musical Norms by "Intelligent Dance Music" - Ramzy Alwakeel

Decline of the Rave Inspired Clubculture in China: State Suppression, Clubber Adaptations, and Socio-cultural Transformations - Matthew M Chew

Neotrance and the Psychedelic Festival - Graham St John

Too Young to Drink, Too Old to Dance: The Influences of Age and Gender on (Non) Rave Participation - Julie Gregory

DJ Culture in the Commercial Sydney Dance Music Scene - Ed Montano

From the Floor

Convergence and Soniculture: 10 Years of MUTEK - tobias c. van Veen

The Hardcore Continuum? - Jeremy Gilbert

The Abstract Reality of the "Hardcore Continuum" - Mark Fisher

12 Noon, Black Rock City - Graham St John

The Inverted Sublimity of the Dark Psytrance Dance Floor - Botond Vitos

Reviews

We Call It Techno! A Documentary About Germany’s Early Techno Scene (Sextro and Wick) - Hillegonda C Rietveld

Lost and Sound: Berlin, Techno, und der Easyjetset (Rapp) - Sean Nye

Chromatic Variation in Ethnographic Research: A Review of Psychedelic White: Goa Trance and the Viscosity of Race (Saldanha) - Anthony D'Andrea

Global Nomads: Techno and New Age as Transnational Countercultures in Ibiza and Goa (D'Andrea) - Charles de Ledesma

Breakcore: Identity and Interaction on Peer-to-Peer (Whelan) - Emily Ferrigno

The High Life: Club Kids, Harm and Drug Policy (Perrone) - Lucy Gibson


To be published twice annually, Dancecult features an advisory board of international experts,
and has emerged as an extension of the international EDMC research network, Dancecult.net:

Submissions: The journal features a fully electronic submission and reviewing procedure. Once you have logged in and registered as an author you are able to submit content to the journal by clicking on “Author” in your “User Home” column. Once submitted, you are able to track the status of your submission.

Executive Editor - Graham St John
Managing Editor - Eliot Bates
Reviews Editor - Karenza Moore

Dancecult wishes to thank:
Eliot Bates for the logo design, pdf layout, and fearless wrangling with the OJS installation.
Todd Thille for web design and banner.
Tobias van Veen and Cato Pulleyblank for helpful advice and suggestions on web layout.
Alex Canazei for first edition images (including cover image).

Friday, September 04, 2009

Ozora: Field of Dreams

Photo: Sean Vassallo

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


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

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

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

MWNM by Bojan Bilic


Photo: P Ekman

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

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

Valeria Castellano
Jan Szalkowski

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

Alex604

Dia KL

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

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

Photo by P. Ekman

Totality Freaks and Shadow Dancing


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

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

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

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

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

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

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


House of Diversity


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

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

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



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



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

Thursday, July 30, 2009

The Journeybook launches in SF on Aug 8 2009




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

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

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

Price: $15.00

http://www.thejourneybook.com/events

Monday, February 09, 2009

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.

Saturday, September 06, 2008

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.

Monday, August 04, 2008

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