Sonica 2007: Mountains, Trees and Disposable Batteries

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




Upgrade to the Longer Now

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


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

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

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

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

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



Energy Sacrifice & The Party


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks to Susanne Riemann for some photos used here.