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.

Branded @ Green & Blue

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

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

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

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

Branded, Literally

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

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


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


















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

Electromegalomania

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














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














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

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

Not a head music, this was most distinctively a body music, one which is not only the mark of Green&Blue but hugely popular throughout Germany. In his recent Turn the Beat Around: The Secret History of Disco, Peter Shapiro makes a curious point about popular dance forms (in American culture).

After wars and traumatic events, American popular music has always returned to the body as a locus of meaning and turned its back on language: after the Civil War, barn dances and square dances were all the rage, and this was also when burlesque dancing began in the United States with the vaudevillean skirt dance; the end of World War I saw the dawning of the Jazz Age, World War II saw rock and roll.

And he suggests that at the end of the 1960s and Vietnam war protest America experienced an escape into disco. Following this logic, and shifting our focus to Germany, the post-Wall (and Cold War) context appears to have conditioned the turn to the non-rhetorical grounds of electro – in a body re-unifying context of consciousness loss and narcissism. What is also interesting in this and other forms of music, is that the underground and rebellious sensibility passing from the earliest disc-cultures into all subsequent dance cultures, appears spectacularly corrupt and faux at Green&Blue. According to Shapiro, the defiance of fascism embodied in the Hitler-era Jugend Youth (or “Swing Kids”) in Germany and other clandestine disc-cultures in Paris during the Occupation, gave critical shape to disco - and, as we might read, to subsequent electronic dance cultures where an outlaw sensibility is commonly adopted, even when those who make party do so within totally licensed and commodified dancescapes. Green&Blue appears to have stronger roots in the concert tradition and in the standardisation of clubbing, entertainment and recreational experience than the “Swing Kids”.

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

Alice Out of Wonderland

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

Pertinent questions in this environment.


Thanks to Wolfgang Sterneck for many of these photos