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

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

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

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

Progressive vs Full On

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

Photo by Yuda Braun

In its second year, the TAZ was held near Arad on the edge of the Negev close to the Occupied Territories. I traveled there from Mitzpe Ramon with Yoni and Max of minimal progressive outfit AKD (who would play a live set and are due to release their second CD in a couple of months). As an interactive psymphonie with a host of local and international maestros conducting the currents through which 1500-2000 participants rafted wild-style for 3-4 days, the TAZ holds ground at the progressive psychedelic edge of the crowded Israeli trance calendar. The event attracts partisans of a diverse alternative milieu, sound experimentalists, surfers of the mind, body and spirit negotiating progressive psychedelic swells within the oceans of international trance (represented at the TAZ by the likes of Atmos, Ace Ventura, D-Nox, James Munro, Perfect Stranger, Aerospace and Gaby 2B). Although this event was predominantly “progressive” (and thus hosting music usually between 135-145 bpm) it wasn’t purely so. As has become common to open-air trance events, faster and more deranged tempos—regarded in Israel as “full on”—reverberated through nocturnal hours before sunrise and daylight DJ and live sets combining progressive minimalism with complex psychedelic structures: the distinctive sounds of progressive psychedelic.

Photo by Joshua Schmidt
The style-skewing would be reversed at the other major psytrance event held in the country over the same weekend: Shagaat’s Morrison Drops Festival on the Dead Sea (which I did not attend). Besides stating that the Dead Sea is “the lowest place on earth”, the promotional literature conveys that the event was held in honor of Jim Morrison, often, intriguingly enough, compared favorably with Dionysus. Rather idolised as “the one that has started it all”, the event organizers not only identify with a psychedelic lineage, but have apparently located its divine source and authority in the American 1960s. A page of the festival information booklet even featured the entire lyrics to Morrison’s “Scream of the Butterfly”, after which this edition of the festival was named. Enabling its participants the potential to reach astounding heights at the lowest place on the planet, the event featured a predominately “full on” main stage and a less popular “progressive” stage. Identified with the likes of Astrix, GMS, Talamasca, Maximum (formerly Serious Isness), and Xerox (the last two performing at Morrison Drops) and with labels like BNE and HOM-mega, and with fans typecasting the music (and themselves) as “serious” and “hard” (not, therefore, “cheesy” or “emotional”), “full on” features a tempo often paced between 145-150 bpm and a preference for heavy “psytars” (synthesized electric guitar riffs). As one enthusiast put it: “It’s a ride with 100 jet thrusters. Hyper to the max and even scary at times”.

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

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

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

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

A TAZ Too Far?

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

Photo by Yuda Braun
Photo by Carew

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

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

Neotrance and Freak Ritual

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

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

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













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

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


Psywarriors

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

Photo by Yuda Braun

A Passport to Zionysus

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

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



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



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

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
















Squatting Liminality

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

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

Photo by Omer

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

Freaks in the Holy Land

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

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

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

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

Photo by Carew

Photo by Yuda Braun