Edgecentral

Rave From the Grave: Dark Trance and the Return of the Dead

2011-12-14T03:50:00.005+01:00

Karnaval 2008, Italy. Photo by www.alexcanazei.com

A new book from McFarland, Zombies Are Us: Essays on the Humanity of the Walking Dead, edited by Cory James Rushton and Christopher M. Moreman, has recently been published which features my chapter "Rave From the Grave: Dark Trance and the Return of the Dead"

For more about the book see Zombies Are Us.

While McFarland is unlikely to win awards for excellence in publishing, this is a very good collection of essays and has a companion volume "Race, Oppression and the Zombie: Essays on Cross-Cultural Appropriations of the Caribbean Tradition". These were originally one volume but I guess McFarland saw the $s in the lead in to Halloween this year. In any case, these volumes are integral to a zombie heuristic apocalypse that has recently effected scholarship.

Unfortunately, this publisher can't see the value in promoting the TOCs of some of their books, like this one, but you can view that and some content at Google books. The photo above by Alex Canazie (which, by the way, is infinitely better than the "naked chick" chosen for the cover design) was intended to be included with the chapter but could not be included in the book (which features no figures).

Here's the introduction to my chapter, Rave From the Grave: Dark Trance and the Return of the Dead

Amid the aural assault you catch a line from Donne’s Holy Sonnet 10: “Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me”. Behind the chilling caterwauls, a petrified girl whispers “Are we still alive?” The former line is used in Xenomorph’s anthemic “Necroid Millenium” (1998), and the latter DarKDescendent’s “The Invasion” (Brazilian V.A.Mpires, 2008), sonic bookends to a decade in darkpsy, a genre of psychedelic trance (psytrance) music that has arisen in popularity internationally. Also known as “horror trance” or “night trance”, performed by DJs before crowds of enthusiasts during the darker hours at psytrance events around the globe, darkpsy revels in the gothic liminality of the zombie, and other monstrous icons. Part of a larger ethnographic and documentary project on psytrance, this chapter investigates dark trance (and zombie raves), documenting how the zombie illustrates a desire for social re-animation among youth in the contemporary.

Lifted from horror cinema and computer game fiction, apparent in vocal samples, label sensibilities, fashion, and body modifications, and evident in post-apocalyptic aesthetics, the living dead caricature is manifest. Simultaneously dead and alive, with protagonists seeking transit from death to life, the zombie is a liminal figure ready made for the dance party. After all, a selling point for Return of the Living Dead (1985) was that the dead were “back from the grave and ready to party”. The dance floor has become a critical topos for the zombie since it signifies the desire to return from deteriorating lifeworld conditions, to be revived from the isolation, even social “death”, of modern life. It is on the psytrance dance floor that the zombie holds such purchase for it offers a symbolic assemblage emblematic of the altered states of mind and flesh sought and achieved there, an iconic repertoire for the dispossession of routine selfhood. Moreover, it is a device appropriated in the collective performance of re-enchantment from a spiritless and disembodied lifeworld. As the living dead archetype articulates self-dissolution, the zombie has become allegorical of the desire for social revitalization. Yet, the zombie possesses a deep ambivalence that renders this monster an ideal icon for ecstatic entrancement. Thus I begin with a discussion of the zombie as a historically ambivalent signifier for ecstatic dance.

Begoggled in the Mega-Vibe: Burning Man

2011-07-09T00:22:00.042+02:00

Reposting a blog entry from 2007 after it was pulled by Google in late May 2011 after a DMCA Cease and Desist notification that an image reproduced infringed copyright. There was obviously a mistake here on my part, but thanks to the copyright owner of what was frankly an ordinary photograph of a structure reproduced a zillion times, that image has now been removed and I think the post looks much better.

Kyle Hailey

This post offers a brief history of electronic dance music culture at Burning Man, referencing vectors of resistance and expression within EDMCs that are explored further in my book Technomad: Global Raving Countercultures. Towards the end there's some loose comments about the curious interfacing of desert and city, as the begoggled second life merges with the first.

In attending to electronic dance music, I recognize that Burning Man is most certainly not a dance festival or a “rave”, that it hosts many different styles of music, and is, moreover, a site of multiple performance genres, visionary and fire arts. At this point it should be noted that while Burning Man is frequented by a growing population of those who might identify as "technomadic" (i.e. geek nomads and mobile digerati whose "anywhere/anytime" internet connectivity enables rootless business and lifestyle practices), the "techno" explicit to my discussion is specifically related to electronic music practices.

Burning Man, 2007. Scott London.

Metaraving: Bright Lights and Sweet Spots

Burning Man is an annual festival held on the vast canvas of an ancient lake bed (called the "playa") in the Black Rock Desert, northwestern Nevada. As an unparalleled universe of radical self-expression and non-dogmatic ritual initiated on San Francisco’s Baker Beach by Larry Harvey and Jerry James in 1986, Burning Man would become, following its transition to the Black Rock Desert in 1990, an outlandish pilgrimage center for alternative art and performance communities in the Bay Area, the West Coast, across the US, and around the world. The event is backed by decades of Californian freaklore. In his discussion of the “cults of Burning Man”, Erik Davis (2005: 17) outlines “cultural patterns” manifesting in this “promiscuous carnival of souls, a metaphysical fleamarket, a demolition derby of reality constructs colliding in a parched void”. Refractions of Californian spiritual counterculture more generally, these milieus of participant gravitation—the Cult of Experience, the Cult of Intoxicants, the Cult of Flicker, the Cult of Juxtapose, and the Cult of Meaningless Chaos—are cultures of performance and praxis overlapping with on-site vibe tribes, and their variant styles and outrageous commitments.

With a diverse array of musics ranging from neo-tribal rhythms to breakbeat, hip hop to lofty intelligent soundscapes alongside jazz and punk rock etc, as Robert Kozinets and John Sherry (2004: 289) point out, “multiple musics demarcate, blend and merge on geographic boundaries, spilling into one another … pooling into pure concentrations near encamped banks of speakers”. In this staged city such “pure concentrations” may coincide with the concentrations of responsibility constituted in Dionysian, outlaw, exile, avant-garde, spiritual and other vectors emerging within electronic dance music culture and gaining admission to this outland. As an ocean of vibes orchestrated and nurtured by “tribes” trained in these “cultic” practices and amplifying variant audiotronics, this vast counter-matrix appears as a miscegeny of bright lights and sweet spots, a sonic hyper-liminal zone like that which I experienced on my initial visit to Black Rock City in 2003 when I camped with the crew at Low Expectations right by the House of Lotus dance camp.

Burning Man was and never will be a “rave”. Yet its status as “the ultimate metarave” (the phrase comes from tireless media producer and impressario Michael Gosney who initiated San Francisco's Digital Be-Ins) seems to have solidified in recent years. In 2006, the year of my most recent Burn, the evidence was manifest in the wake of the torching of the 40 foot figure—the city’s limit experience which sees most of its inhabitants and hundreds of “art cars” encircle the blazing Man, with the scene approximating the Drive-in At the End of Time. Packed with fireworks and mortar-rockets, the towering icon cascades with sparks and bursts apart in a spectacular series of detonations, its demise willed by the bold and the sumptuous who've arrived in their tens of thousands. Kozinets and Sherry (2004: 293) suggest that “like many elements of post-rave, the burning of the Man opens up opportunities to embody a popular dance orgiasm facilitated by modern technologies”. Following the burn in 2006 I realized what they meant, for I found myself amidst mobile dance camps who’d unloaded their systems equipment, in one case go go cages, and were pumping bass and breaks across the alkaline desert night, attracting thousands of Burners wired-up and el-wired.

Photo by Scott London

This post-burn tradition goes back to 1997 to the unassumingly named “Community Dance” event. Operated by Gosney’s Radio-V, San Francisco’s Anon Salon along with the pioneer Howard St warehouse party collective the Consortium of Collective Consciousness (CCC), Dimension 7 and LA’s Tonka sound system (not to be confused with the original UK outfit by that name), that event featured trance progenitor Goa Gil (who played for 7 hours).

Photo: Scott London

But standing tall beyond this was the most outlandish scene of all: “Uchronia” an installation 200 feet long, 100 feet wide and 50 feet tall, funded by Belgian artists and built using rejected timber from a Canadian lumber mill by dozens of volunteers. Used in the title of Charles Renouvier’s 1876 novel Uchronie (L’Utopie dans l’histoire) and replacing topos (place) from ‘utopia’ (which literally means ‘no place’) with chronos (time) to generate a word that literally means no time, “uchronic” refers to an “alternate history” that enables its observers to question their reality. For its creators, Uchronia was a “portal, showing us what the world could be like if creativity ruled supreme” and time is hung differently. What one observer in the San Francisco Chronicle described as a “giant’s haystack twisted into a computer model of a wave with curved entrances on three sides”, was thus an intentional parallel-world posing the question to its occupants (“Uchronians”) in the fashion alternate histories pose for their readers: “what if?” And the principal activity within this time-machine, this spatio-temporal question mark in which most were undoubtedly oblivious to its meaning intellectually yet might have understood viscerally? With the desert night a welcome reprieve from the frying sun and white-outs, its occupants bathed in neon-green light, what would become more widely known as “the Belgian Waffle” was a dance club. Video by Mark Day. And of course, on the final night, it burned. With its image seared into my retinas for almost a week, Uchronia became a cavernous conflagration, an allegory of impermanence, the flaming whispers of which engulfed all who bore witness. In the wake of its desolation, on the celebratory margins of its dissolution, sensual acts of beauty transpired in blinking conclaves upon the playa. In its remarkably short life, surely one of the most spectacular clubs ever created.

One of the other huge structures on the playa in 2006 was the Connexus Cathedral, which was a dance club over the main nights.

Photos by Scott London and Steve Fritz.

The Techno Ghetto

But it wasn’t always like this. What was then known as “rave” music was first amplified at Burning Man in 1992 when a small “rave camp” appeared a mile from the main encampment, “glomming parasitically”, according to Brian Doherty’s account in This is Burning Man: The Rise of a New American Underground (2004: 66), “onto the Porta-Johns.” The camp was organized by Craig Ellenwood of the early Oakland acid party crew Mr Floppy’s Flophouse. The headline act was Goa Gil, who played from Aphex Twin’s “Digeridoo” on digital audio tape to no more than 25 people. Also playing to hardly anybody were Brad Tumbleweed, Dave Synthesis (aka “Dsyn”), Craig and Terbo Ted. Terbo Ted has the mantle of being the first person to DJ at Burning Man. Ted informed me that in 1992 he “played on Friday afternoon to literally no one, with only ten miles of dust in front of me. It was awesome”. While he can’t recall it with precision, the first track played was some “spacey stuff” from a Jean Michel Jarre 12 inch from Craig Ellenwood’s record pile, “a record he was willing to sacrifice to the elements … it was literally a sound check” (ibid). Here is a link to a short excerpt from Terbo Ted’s live acid techno set in 1995, which was the first electronic music recorded at Burning Man to be released on CD (“Turbine time” on Shag).

The period was primitive to say the least. As Charles A. Gadeken reported in 1993: “I remember going out to the rave camp, it was five guys, a van, a couple of big speakers, a card board box covered in tin foil, colored lights and a strobe light. It was all cool.” But the reception was generally less than enthusiastic. Ted recalls that the punk (add your own prefix: anarcho, cyber, steam, shotgun, etc.) sensibility predominating at Burning Man held DJ culture complicit with “consumer society and a stain on an otherwise anarchistic, art-oriented event.” On one morning near sunrise in 1993,

a hippy dude came up to me while I was playing music on the sound system and he holds up a knife towards me and yells “are you crazy?” And I say “no, you’re the one with a knife”. And then he says he’s going to cut me or the speakers. So I turn it down, ditched the decks and circled far and wide off into the desert. He tried to cut the speaker cones with his knife but they had metal grills on the fronts, he looked like a fool and gave up and wandered off. I put on a cassette of Squeeze’s Black Coffee in Bed as he was walking away.

Burning Man forced the techno reservationists to maintain their isolation a mile from Main Camp between 1992 and 1998, during which time the camp evolved into a kind of outlaw satellite of Black Rock City. Over the following two years, San Francisco’s DiY music and culture collective SPaZ (itself co-founded by Ted and D syn, along with Aaron, No.E Sunflowrfish and various others) orchestrated the sounds exclusively. It was extreme, eclectic and haphazard. Ted recalls that at one point in 1993 “we put on a cassette of the Eagles’ Hotel California by request of these two cowboys who rode in from the desert on horseback. They were thrilled.” According to Aaron, that same year “a wind storm blew down our speaker stacks, but they were still plugged in and we never stopped playing”. Listed as the official “rave” in the Burning Man brochure for 1994, SPaZ would effect a great influence on sound system culture at the festival.

Burning Man, 1995 CCC.

In these years, SPaZ, members of which later initiated the Autonomous Mutant Festival, were effectively encouraging Burning Man to be “more like the UK festival vibe where anybody could bring their sound, big or small”. So, in 1995, while SPaZ set up their small system at four points amplifying everything from minimal techno and drum-n-bass to psytrance under a four story three-cornered scaffolding with lights and “variously garish and random streamers, banners and tarps, from punk to dayglo-indian-balinese-cybertrance-batiks to outright monstrosities” visible from Main Camp, Wicked (the famed UK derived outfit who held full moon and other parties on beaches and in parks around the Bay area between 1991-1996) arrived with their turbo rig and scaffolding supporting their black and white banner. SPaZ hosted artists including Minor Minor (Gateway), Theta Blip, Chizaru and Subtropic. Featuring himself, among with DJs Markie and Bay area guest’s Spun, Felix the Dog, Rob Doten and Alvaro, Wicked co-founder (and now running Grayhound Records) Garth stated to me that they “played for 4 days and nights through hail, wind, rain and electrical storms”. North America's first free party tekno sound system, Pirate Audio, also made an appearance that year. On the windblown frontiers of techno, in this nascent vibrant ghetto accommodating the eclectic, experimental and inclusive sounds of SPaZ, the house sounds of Wicked, and other sounds besides, Burning Man had begun to attract a variety of socio-sonic aesthetics, paving the way for the mega-vibe it would later become.

In this period, besides differences between the habitués and proponents of varying dance aesthetics (from the inclusive to the more proprietary) there was considerable conflict between those who regarded themselves true Burners and those they held as little more than raving interlopers. As Ted remembers, “ravers were always pariahs at Burning Man …. it’s like we were the poor people on the wrong side of the tracks and the wrong side of the man”. At one event, a bag of human excrement was dropped on the dance camp from a low flying aircraft. According to Garth, Burning Man had the porta-potties removed from the rave camp before the festival ended. “When people started crapping on the desert for lack of options, someone carried over a bag to main camp .... Burning Man was so enraged by this they flew over and apparently dropped it on one camp."

1996 was the year of the “techno ghetto”, the brainchild of Terbo Ted and an attempt to make the ghettoized rave camp a legitimate outer suburb of Black Rock City (BRC). According to Ted, who had the support of Burning Man organizers, as a “mega-theme camp” the “techno ghetto” idea was a “fractalized imprint” of BRC’s Main Camp at the time. “We were into pre-planned zoning, using surveying flags to plot out an orbital city with sound systems on the outer ring and encampments in the center”. “Ghetto” sound systems included SPaZ, the CCC, Gateway and Wicked. Together with a live PA from local electronic producers E.T.I. and Astral Matrix, Wicked DJs played along with DJ Dimitri of Dee-Lite all performing under a projection pyramid constructed by VJ and laser outfit Dimension 7.

The "rave camp" in 1996, Mickey.

But, things didn’t go according to plan in the ghetto. According to Garth, “the honeymoon ended that year. The theme was “Hellco” and that was what they conjured up… by this point there were too many [sound systems], all bleeding into each other…. it felt more like a super club on the playa”. As Terbo Ted recalls, the “ghetto” was an “abysmal failure … DiY gone mad… Music snobbery and cliquishness and DiY anarchist tendencies prevented an orderly camp from forming and the resulting spread-too-thin sprawl proved to be dangerous in an era when cars were still driving at every vector on the playa at high speeds in dust storm white outs”. Both Garth and Ted are in part referring to a tragic incident in 1996 when three people were seriously injured sleeping in their tent near the Gateway sound system, one in a coma for months, after being collected by a stoned driver. Together with an apparent perception that the “rave” was giving Burning Man a bad name within official circles, and the likelihood that techno was perceived as disturbing electronic chatter for many participants (including Doherty, who recounts hostilities in This is Burning Man, 2004: 171-173), this incident generated an unofficial “anti-rave policy”, which was effectively countered through the compromise entailed in Gosney’s innocuously named “Community Dance” in 1997.

The Veg-O-Matic of the Apocalypse vs Goa Gil

That known DJs were being targeted by Burning Man organisers was a circumstance endured by Paul D. Miller (aka DJ Spooky), who was apparently pursued on the playa by “Pipi Longstocking” in the mid 1990s. But the tension between ravers and Burners seems to have been appropriately dramatized in a performance which saw a standoff between Goa Gil and a giant peddle-powered flamethrowing drill and Margerita maker called the Veg-O-Matic of the Apocalypse—or, more to the point, anti-rave crusader Jim Mason who was peddling the beast. Mason’s Veg-O-Matic is described by Robert Gelman in his article Trial by Fire: “It’s straight out of hell, suggesting engineering from the industrial revolution transported to Fritz Lang's Metropolis. Part vehicle, part flame-thrower, part earth drilling device, I envision this machine being used to battle creatures in a 1950s monster movie, or to torture souls of the damned in the realm of satan”. With a pressurized gas-charger spurting flames as far as seventy feet from its barrel, and a gathering mob inciting it to greater acts of destruction, the Veg-O-Matic was known to burn installations in its path following the demise of the Man. On its post-Burn rampage, when the Veg-O-Matic rolled into the first Community Dance camp in 1997, Mason found Goa Gil (and a UFO art installation) directly in his path:

The crew of the machine is tilting the flamethrower’s barrel up at the console. Gil is staring down the 12-foot barrel of this jet powered char-broiler. I had to remind myself that this is theatre, or is it? I’m still not sure. “Burn it!” the mob chants, “Burn THEM!” Like an opposing pacifist army, the ravers are standing their ground, some shouting in defiance of the threat, some in disbelief that this could really be happening. Chicken John, like the demented circus ringmaster that he is, issues his now-familiar warning over the bullhorn [“Stand Aside”]. We seem to have travelled back centuries in time. I don’t remember ever feeling farther from home than this.

Photo by Leo Nash

The mob were even demanding Led Zeppelin. It was perhaps in this moment so far from Kansas—when Gil stood his ground, even turned the volume up, in the face of obliteration—that EDMC gained credibility at Burning Man. Yet such gains are not synonymous with legitimacy. To this day, disputes rage over the validity of arrant “loudsters”, “monotonous computer loop music,” and the presence of some of the highest paid DJ brand names like Paul Oakenfold and Tiesto. See, for example, this discussion on tribe.net. When the biggest names in commercial dance music perform “45-minute showcase sets to massive crowds at MTV-Beach-Party-style setups”, it is recognized to be the “EDM equivalent of putting a Starbucks or H&M on the Esplanade”. In a typically avant response, which notably does not reject electronic music, the author of this comment, ST Frequency, states in a post on Reality Sandwich that he would rather “something a little more eclectic and unexpected, like funky industrial bluegrass, or ambient dub-zydeco” than “a cacophony of 22 differentepic trance records ‘blowing up’ from every imaginable direction”.

A Rhythm Remorseless

While concerns are held about the presence of what Mark Van Proyen refers to as the “Ibiza set” and other “tourists” swamping the festival (in Gilmore 2006: 151), after several Community Dance events, which were promoted by producer Gosney’s Radio-V as a “techno tribal ritual celebration” (involving the likes of Gil, Shpongle, Ollie Wisdom, AB Didge, Medicine Drum, Kode IV, Tsuyoshi, X-Dream, Nick Taylor and Tristan, and with contributions from techno-tribes such as the CCC, Anon Salon, Koinonea, Sacred Dance Society and Dimension 7), the audiotronics and culture of post-rave would become integral to the event.

Blue Room fire truck, 1998, CCC.

Simon Posford at the Community Dance camp 1999. Landon Elmore.

In 1998, a community sound system featuring New York's Blackkat collective, The Army of Love, SPaZ and Arcane was unpacked on the playa. Holding their own desert dance gatherings over the previous five years in the Mojave, Moontribe also set up that year, with artists performing for three consecutive nights next to The Temple of Rudra, with the final party drawing 2000 people following Pepe Ozan’s opera. Symptomatic of the ongoing tensions, as Ozan apparently neglected to inform the Burning Man organization about his deal with Moontribe (they were providing the soundcheck for his opera), the event’s unique peace keepers, the Black Rock Rangers, unplugged the generator at dawn on the first night. With the all-too-familiar experience of having “Rangers” shut them down, Moontribe’s Treavor successfully pushed for an agreement for an all-night party after the opera on the Friday night, which also happened to be a full moon. According to Treavor, with himself, Petey and Matthew Magic performing: “we kicked in with some full on Psy Trance/Techno madness and tons of people came over and stayed in front of our system until around noon when it was about 110 degrees and time to end”.

Community Dance lasers 1998, Michael Gosney.

Full Moon morning, Burning Man 1998, from Fusion Anomaly.

Given their commitment to throwing free Full Moon Gatherings in the Mojave desert since 1993 in the face of considerable adversity (remote conditions, the law and internal conflicts included), a Moontribe association would draw considerable kudos in an environment which would continue to contest the presence of “commercial muzack”. Yet, internal compromises, collaborations and concessions within Burning Man would see what was initially a source of much derision and contempt—and ghettoized one mile from Main Camp—gain greater acceptance within its sprawling inner but mostly outer conclaves (the loudest camps are now placed in the "Large Scale Sound Art Zone" at the periphery of the city, where speakers must be faced away from the city, and where a maximum power amplification of 300 watts is permitted).

Burning Man art project funding reveals the persistence of an uneasy relationship. As author of the forthcoming ethnography on Burning Man (Theater in a Crowded Fire), Lee Gilmore, informed me: “many organizers of dance oriented theme camps complain that the Burning Man Organization never funds their artistic contributions, so they have to foot the bill themselves. For their part, the organization says they simply have limited resources and other priorities. And that the EDMC scene has many other self-funding and/or commercial venues.” In 1998, the “techno ghetto” was no more. By 1999, when the final Community Dance camp was staged in Landon Elmore's recreation of the Barbury Triangle Crop Circle, the sounds of psytrance, breakbeats, tribal house etc had become flush with the soundscape of Burning Man.

Aerial view of Community Dance Camp 1999. Barbury Triangle Crop Circle. Landon Elmore.

By 2007, with Large-Scale Sound Art Camps like from Emerald City, the Opulent Temple of Venus, Lemuria and the Connexus Cathedral, electronic dance music culture had become integral to Burning Man. The audio-visual aesthetics and style of venues are diverse: from performance troupe's like El Circo with their post-apocalyptic "dreamtime imagery" and Bag End sound system to the Deep End groovement; from salacious theme camps like Bianca’s Smut Shack and Illuminaughty, to the Rhythm Society’s Blyss Abyss or the Church of WOW; and from fixed sound art installations like the House of Lotus to mobile units such as the Space Cowboys "All-Terrain Audio Visual Assault Vehicle" (a Unimog fitted with video projectors, displays, a bubble for a DJ, and a sound system, which they claim is "the largest off-road sound system in the world"), and the shape and location shifting vehicles of the DI5ORIENT EXPRESS.

Photos by Kyle Hailey

Decompressions and Recompressions

The spirit of Burning Man is raised throughout the year in San Francisco at events such as the pre-Burn Flambé Lounge, the annual Decompression Street Fair, the How Weird Street Faire, the Sea of Dreams New Year's Eve events and numerous sound art camp fundraising events held between May and August every year. The Decompression events have become hugely popular multi-area dance parties, and attracting many who’ve never been to Burning Man. The San Francisco "Heat the Street Faire" Decompression party is a reprise of the Burn held on 8 city blocks two months after the event.
By 2007, there were Decompression events in various US cities including Los Angeles and New York, and international events such as those in London and Tokyo. There were even “pre-Decompression parties” like the one I attended in October 2007 at a warehouse at 1300 Potrero produced by Want It and Ambient Mafia (watch a video of the party here) and, of course a host of Decompression after-parties.

Kyle Hailey
This seemingly endless series of events provokes inquiries about the boundaries of Burning Man. When does the event terminate? When does it start? And for that matter, where is it? While the annual event transpires for a week from late August into September out beyond the small town of Gerlach-Empire in the Black Rock Desert, Nevada, its spatial and temporal boundaries are getting fuzzier. It might be stated that this was always the case. Historically the event has been a virtual imprint of San Francisco arts, technology and visionary cultures, its mutant-vehicular and theme-camped topos inscribed with emergent aesthetics and prevailing trends (such as the fairly belated Green Man theme of 2007), with remote experiments drifting back into the city proper, morphing the Bay area in often unseen and surprising ways. Indicative of scenes evolving within San Francisco, Burner fashion, body-mods, multimedia, performance arts, alterna-kit and desert punk filter back into what Burners call the “default” world. And so, to stay with my theme, the sounds and styles of Black Rock City are evident in San Francisco clublife at venues like 1015 Folsom, Sublounge and Mighty in SOMISSPRO or in art spaces like SomArts Cultural Center, Nimby and Cellspace along with parties in countless warehouse spaces. As Steven Jones makes clear in his San Francisco Bay Guardian article "Burner Season", Burning Man art and San Francisco club scenes “have merged and morphed, symbiotically feeding off one another to create something entirely new under the sun, a sort of code for the freaks who like to dress outrageously, dance madly, and be embraced for doing so.” As Promoter Joegh Bullock explains, the term "Burner" has become “shorthand for a certain style of party”. One of the main sites of Burner sensibility has been Bullock’s Anon Salon. Referred to by Gosney as San Francisco’s “cyberdelic speakeasy”, from the early 1990s Anon Salon had been an interactive, avant-garde, no–spectator style event reflective of cutting edge trends (such as the “New Edge Salon for Movers and Groovers”, Ambiotica), and buoyed by a camaraderie poorly grokked by non-Burners.

Residual Burn

New York city resident, DJ Spooky, recently (see film) referred to Burning Man as a context for "the prolonged present”. Out there, “the demarcation lines we’ve all been conditioned to accept dissolve… time blurs, you lose all of these strictures of New York, waking up, or going back to sleep, people, parties, events, blur, scenes blur, camps blur…” This is a common experience: playa life is an altered reality in which day and night, camping spaces, pounding rhythms, weird pants, strange laughter and familiar people, merge in the disorienting carnivalesque. Out on the playa, "now" is an extended experience seemingly lasting longer than most other "nows" in the lives of participants, generating a powerful compulsion amongst devoted Burners to relive the liminal experience of the playa time and again, year after year, often modifying and optimising the experience to suit their personal pleasures, dreams and visions. In making the return journey, pilgrims are not only revisiting the same place but are re-accessing the same time. But it is a "time" that is not so much a duration as a "time out of time", an "eternal presence" reminiscent of that explored by Roy Rappaport in those intensive ritual phases in which one experiences “the sheer successionless duration of the absolute changelessness of what recurs, the successionless duration of what is neither preceded nor succeeded, which is ‘neither coming nor passing away,’ but always was and always will be” (1999: 231). Awash with synchronized melodies and off-beats rhythms, under the rule of the sun and the heat of controlled burns, playing chicken with a fleet of motorized tarts, in the gaze of an androgenous BRC denizen with cyberdreads, in this “successionless duration”, “one returns", to revisit Rappaport, "ever again to what never changes”: playa time.

It may be a "place" out of time, but the prolonged presence of this place seems as fine and persistent as the white alkaline dust one carries home from the playa. Many Burners relate how the experience of Burning Man impacts their "default" existence, that their "pilgrimage" effects and shapes everyday life on the street, at work, in their homes, how they interact with others, how they raise their families, a theme considered in Lee Gilmore's ethnography, and by contributors to the book she co-edited (with Mark Van Proyen) Afterburn, and worthy of further research.

So what happens when banana time is snuk out at carnival's end? When elements of "the quick and the changeless" steal back to the "default" world? When impermanence gets an encore? Burning Man clearly leaves a compelling impression on its habitués many of whom reboot eternity the year round in a proliferation of Burn-inspired intercalary events. The event appears to be at the center of a burgeoning creative counter-cultural industry whose mission is to make now last longer, to enable one's "freak" to be more often set to "on", to facilitate the distribution of playa time across time and space. As the commitment to extending Burner artistic practices, ethos and identity beyond Burning Man possesses a reverse correspondence to that of "leaving no trace" on the playa, as the dedication to mobilizing Operation Enduring Freak appears to hold a strange equivalence to reducing MOOP ("Matter Out of Place") in the desert, Regional and other residual burns immolate the present across the continent and further afield. As announced at the official Burning Man webportal, "dozens of satellites orbit the Mother ship," with this cultural movement now encompassing "over sixty communities in seven countries, spread out over four continents."

As bike-saddled and begoggled Burners, drunk on playa time, in pink leathered chaps, pith helmets and home-made masks, ride the tall curling white-outs through the streets of San Francisco, as the Bakhtinian "second world" of the people floods the thoroughfares and habitats of the "first", as the remote cosmic life revives local lifestyle, it seems reasonable to assume that one's "social time", to again cite Rappaport, becomes enchanted by the ecstatic theater of "cosmic time". Research on the growing network of Burner tribes, and the accelerating frequency of Burn-inspired events, would shed light on this. The name for Vancouver's regional event, Recompression, might indicate something of the extended liminality desired. New York's Freak Factory, Santa Barbara's Clan Destino, or the network of virtual groups on tribe.net and Facebook et al. might illustrate what post-Burn liminalisation looks, sounds and is encoded like. And the name (along with the activities) of the extra-event disaster relief initiative Burners Without Borders may provide us with some insight on the borderless future.

But, amidst this accelerating and expanding presence, this prolongation of the prolonged present, what becomes of Burning Man, whose "spirit", like that of any "event", is its own ephemerality?

Doherty, Brian. 2004. This is Burning Man: The Rise of a New American Underground. New York: Little, Brown and Company.
Erik Davis. 2005. “Beyond Belief: The Cults of Burning Man”. In Lee Gilmore and Mark Van Proyen (eds). Afterburn: Reflections on Burning Man. Albuquerque: The University of New Mexico Press.
Gilmore, Lee. 2006. “Desert Pilgrimage: Liminality, Transformation, and the Other at the Burning Man Festival”. In William H. Swatos, Jr (ed) On the Road to Being There: Studies in Pilgrimage and Tourism in Late Modernity, pp. 125-158. Leiden: Brill.
Kozinets, Robert V. and John F. Sherry, Jr. 2004. “Dancing on Common Ground: Exploring the Sacred at Burning Man.” In Graham St John (ed), Rave Culture and Religion, pp. 287-303. New York and London: Routledge.
Rappaport, Roy. 1999. Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Thanks to Kyle Hailey for many of the beautiful images here. More of his images at the following: Burning Man 2007, Beautiful People from the Future and West Coast Dance.

Photos by Kyle Hailey.

NOW OUT IN PAPERBACK: The Local Scenes and Global Culture of Psytrance

2011-07-06T21:52:00.000+02:00

Graham St John (ed). The Local Scenes and Global Culture of Psytrance
(Routledge, 2010). OUT NOW IN PAPERBACK

Buy online from Routledge and get a *20% discount and free shipping* using the code ERJ88
http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415876964/

This lively textual symposium offers a rich harvest of formative research on the culture of global psytrance (psychedelic trance). As the first book to address the diverse transnationalism of this contemporary electronic dance music phenomenon, the collection hosts interdisciplinary research attending to psytrance as a product of intersecting local and global trajectories. With coverage of scenes in Goa, the UK, Israel, Japan, Italy, the US, Portugal, The Czech Republic and Australia, the collection features a dozen chapters from scholars researching psytrance in worldwide locations, employing various methods, within multiple disciplines.

“This stimulating collection of essays by some of the key researchers in the field provides a genuinely insightful and engaging contribution to the study of psytrance, which students, tutors, and researchers will be turning to for many years to come. I warmly and enthusiastically welcome it.” --Christopher Partridge, Professor of Religious Studies, Lancaster University, UK

Contents

Psytrance: An Introduction. Graham St John

I Goa Trance

1. Goa is a State of Mind: On the Ephemerality of Psychedelic Social Emplacements. Luther Elliott
2. The Decline of Electronic Dance Scenes: The Case of Psytrance in Goa. Anthony D’Andrea
3. The Ghost of Goa Trance: A Retrospective. Arun Saldanha

II Global Psytrance

4. Infinite Noise Spirals: Psytrance as Cosmopolitan Emotion. Hillegonda Rietveld
5. Psychedelic Trance Music Making in the UK: Rhizomatic Craftsmanship and the Global Market Place. Charles de Ledesma
6. Re-evaluating Musical Genre in UK Psytrance. Robin Lindop
7. (En)Countering the Beat: Paradox in Israeli Psytrance. Joshua I. Schmidt

III Liminal Culture

8. DemenCZe: Psychedelic Madhouse in the Czech Republic. Botond Vitos
9. Dionysus Returns: Tuscan Trancers and Euripides’ The Bacchae. Chiara Baldini
10. Weaving the Underground Web: Neotribalism and Psytrance on Tribe.net. Jenny Ryan
11. Narratives in Noise: Reflexivity, Migration and Liminality in the Australian Psytrance Scene. Alex Lambert
12. Liminal Culture and Global Movement: The Transitional World of Psytrance. Graham St John

More information and reviews here:
http://www.edgecentral.net/psytrancecollectioncall.htm

Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture edition 3.1

2011-06-22T13:56:00.000+02:00

DANCECULT | Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture
==================
Volume 3 * Number 1 * 2011
==================
http://dj.dancecult.net/

SPECIAL ISSUE ON THE DJ
with Guest Editors Anna Gavanas and Bernardo Alexander Attias

CONTENTS - DANCECULT 3(1)

## Feature Articles ##

The Forging of a White Gay Aesthetic at the Saint, 1980–84
--- Tim Lawrence

The DIY Careers of Techno and Drum ‘n’ Bass DJs in Vienna
--- Rosa Reitsamer

Rumble in the Jungle: City, Place and Uncanny Bass
--- Chris Christodoulou

Headphone–Headset–Jetset: DJ Culture, Mobility and Science Fictions of
Listening
--- Sean Nye

DJ Goa Gil: Kalifornian Exile, Dark Yogi and Dreaded Anomaly
--- Graham St John

## Conversations ##

Off the Record: Turntablism and Controllerism in the 21st Century, Part 1
--- tobias c. van Veen and Bernardo Alexander Attias

##From the Floor##

Nomads In Sound vol 2
--- Anna Gavanas

Meditations on the Death of Vinyl
--- Bernardo Alexander Attias

Turntables of Doom
--- Kath O'Donnell

We call it Swedish Techno
--- Anna Ostrom

”War on the Dancefloor”: The Reproduction of Power and Pleasure at the Amphi
Festival in Cologne
--- Johanna Paulsson

##Reviews##

Man Vibes: Masculinities in the Jamaican Dancehall (Donna P. Hope)
--- Marvin Dale Sterling

Hold on to Your Dreams: Arthur Russell and the Downtown Music Scene, 1973–92
(Tim Lawrence)
--- Charlie de Ledesma

Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture edition 2.1

2011-03-22T11:05:00.000+01:00

OUT NOW!!

DANCECULT | Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture
==================
Volume 2 • Number 1 • 2011
==================
http://dj.dancecult.net/

Dancecult returns with two themes: the dystopian and remix aesthetics of
Detroit and a special From the Floor section on the Love Parade.

CONTENTS - DANCECULT 2(1)

## Feature Articles ##

Disco’s Revenge: House Music’s Nomadic Memory
-- Hillegonda C. Rietveld

Hooked on an Affect: Detroit Techno and Dystopian Digital Culture
-- Richard Pope

Maintaining "Synk" in Detroit: Two Case Studies in the Remix Aesthetic
-- Carleton S. Gholz

Festival Fever and International DJs: The Changing Shape of DJ Culture in
Sydney’s Commercial Electronic Dance Music Scene
-- Ed Montano

## From the Floor ##

Nomads in Sound vol. 1
-- Anna Gavanas

# Special Section on the Love Parade #

Where is Duisburg? An LP Postscript HTML
-- Sean Nye, Ronald Hitzler

Party, Love and Profit: The Rhythms of the Love Parade (Interview with
Wolfgang Sterneck)
-- Graham St John

Pathological Crowds: Affect and Danger in Responses to the Love Parade
Disaster at Duisburg
-- Luis-Manuel Garcia

## Reviews ##

Hip Hop Underground: The Integrity and Ethics of Racial Identification
(Anthony Kwame Harrison) PDF
-- Rebecca Bodenheimer

The Local Scenes and Global Culture of Psytrance (Graham St John)
-- Rupert Till

Pink Noises: Women on Electronic Music and Sound (Tara Rodgers)
-- Anna Gavanas

Technomad: Global Raving Countercultures (Graham St John)
-- Philip Ronald Kirby

Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear (Steve Goodman)
-- tobias c. van Veen

Music World: Donk (Dir. Andy Capper)
-- Philip Ronald Kirby

Speaking in Code (Dir. Amy Grill)
-- tobias c. van Veen

Edition 2.1 is not only a new edition of Dancecult, but a redesigned look. Congratulations to all the volunteers in our new editorial and production team (along with our authors and reviewers) for getting this over the line. Special mention to tobias c. van Veen as our new Managing Editor who is to be congratulated for his dedication to managing this edition, overseeing the redesign of the PDF articles and the transition to our new server. Further accolades to Reviews Editor Karenza Moore; Art Director Cato Pulleyblank who designed our great new logo and transformed our look in Indesign; our Copyeditors Catherine Baker and Katrina Loughrey who poured over the Old Testament; Production Director Gary Powell and Production Assistants Ed Montano, Luis-Manuel Garcia and Botond Vitos; and not least OJS wrestler and Operations Assistant Neal Thomas. Extra thank you to Luis-Manuel Garcia for the German to English translation.

For the full list of our new team see:
http://dj.dancecult.net/index.php/journal/about/editorialTeam

Please note that we have a new Dancecult Style Guide (DSG) now available for download. Tobias and myself have worked hard on producing the new DSG. It is a major improvement on our former style guide (the Old Testament) which now includes coverage of our cross platform requirements. For those submitting material, you must download and read the DSG thoroughly before submitting any material.
http://www.dancecult.net/i/dancecult_styleguide.pdf

From the sweet spot,

Graham St John
Executive Editor

tobias c. van Veen
Managing Editor

Boom Festival 2010: Divine Mothership of Trance

2010-09-01T16:03:00.017+02:00

Photo by Boom Festival

My eyes open upon a lakeside vision.

As I come up, by me sits a woman who might be an Elven princess from epic Tolkien. She bears an uncompromising grin, and I imagine a light jeweled coronetelle wound about her brow as her gaze is cast across the bight. Sparkling azure eyes are fixed upon the structures on the other side, now fading under brilliant pre-twilight.

I too had been surveying shapes on the Other Side—its contours now also receding from view. For some duration, perhaps fifteen minutes or so, my sensorium had been exposed to vistas of inter-dimensional proportions, remote visions, spectral gifts that played havoc with my normative space-time continuum. Here, lakeside, I had been submerged in a world parallel to the “real”. While it is a “world” to which I am unaware in daily life, within the Mothership where The Veils had thinned to a flickering filigree, these worlds had collided.

I had been visited in this duration by hyperspatial emissaries, bearers of gifts presented to me as in a series of objects unfolding in a longue durée of brilliant patterns; offered Persian-like carpets rolling out incessantly and self-unfurling banners festooned with motifs I could hardly understand; unloaded containers evoking God’s Tool Box, with countless back-lit panels opening before me like drawers within drawers within drawers; revealed puzzles possessing morphing shapes and shifting depths like inter-dimensional Rubiks Cubes. I was enticed by a divine strip-tease performed by animate Matryoshka dolls shedding infinite layers of finely embroidered safran garments the discarding of which never obtained absolute exposure. It was a ceaseless operation, and all I could do was stare in complete wonderment, with my eyes closed, and my mouth ajar, at the process of revelation. I wish I possessed the mechanism to understand the contents of these gifts, were operating the program to process the data, had installed the wares to recognise the Logos, held the knowledge to reassemble this hyperspatial Kinder Surprise.

Photo by Jakob Kolar

With eyes closed, I had been gazing upon a world parallel to my own, just as she had been gazing across the lake to the other side. We are equally overcome by the wondrous images encountered. And as our vistas merge under a carnival of reflected lights, I see that which grows mesmerising in the faded heat and light of this day.

We are hunkering in the dirt across a small bay of Lake Idanha-a-Nova, Portugal. On the other side lie clusters of bizarre tents and fantastic structures like those found in an oasis of sound and vision to which one has trekked many thousands of kilometers. The structures belong to the zen gardenesque Healing Area: a Puja Tent, Sound Temple, yurts, Sweat Lodges, tipis, mandala meditation and massage therapy buildings.

Photo by Jakob Kolar

And more immediately across the bight stands the elegant Sacred Fire stage.

Photo by Boom Festival

Bearing a roof resembling a princely turban, it has been established upon a rise above a fire burning near the water's edge. Its flames are visible on a point of the lake where a puja ritual was held during the Opening Ceremony one week ago.

Photo by Boom Festival

Photos by Jakob Kolar

The Sacred Fire was the scene of a tumultuous orgy of ethno-trance acts last night (including Wild Marmalade, Hilight Tribe and Ganga Giri), the eve of the Full Moon when there also transpired a fire walk.

We are at the 2010 edition of Portugal’s Boom Festival. Founded by Diogo Ruivo and Pedro Carvalho in 1997, the biannual festival has evolved into a sacred site for enthusiasts of psychedelic music, art and culture, who have descended, like us, upon this lakeside site in the Beira Baixa province, from locations around the globe. For thirteen years, Boom has been the venue for the ecstatic and consciousness expanding expression of the Goa vibe (see short film on Boom history): a veritable psychedelic Mothership. And now, here we are, being abducted by the vibe. Behind us, back around our peninsula, abductees are probed by bass, protracting their limbs and winding their heads on another plane, at the Groovy Beach stage, this year a magnificent horned structure built by the people from the Do Lab: (see video).

Photo by Aaron Gautschi

Photo by Jakob Kolar

Photo by Boom Festival

Photo by Jakob Kolar

Photos by Reagan Blundell.

Back beyond the Groovy Beach, lay an extraordinary shanty oasis at which there was always something new to hear and see: the Golden Shack Gamelatron (a collaboration between Shrine and Taylor Kuffnery).

Photos by Jakob Kolar

Beyond the Gamelatron, at the festival's crossroads, lay another oasis, nothing less than the Ambient Paradise, the chill stage purposely built like a decompression chamber with calming LED lights and which at its centre holds a stage with dragon sculptures reclining above a pool of water.

Photos by Jakob Kolar

Photo by Reagan Blundell

To our right we are captivated, for in that direction lies the Dance Temple.

Photos by Boom Festival

Photo by Reagan Blundell.

Sally Doolally. Photo by Noam Chojnowski

Down in the Temple over the past week we have been treated to sensual wonderments, premiere sounds on the psychedelic continuum, from polished Goa nuggets care of Man With No Name and Psychopod, night sounds of the likes of REV, electrance care of Perfect Stranger, progressive psyvibes manipulated by Zen Mechanics, M-Theory and Flip Flop et al, to soaring morning melodies orchestrated by James Munro, Antix and Sally Doolally. In this global sacred site for the psytrance community built by Belgian visionary François and with design input from Android Jones and programming of Alfredo Vasconselos, we had been exposed to the work of DJ Dick Trevor who could surely be awarded an honorary doctorate in Psychedelic Science at the Advanced School of Re/Mixing (and who recently played a devastating four hour set at the Ozora Festival – probably the best set to which I’ve been privileged) and Treavor Walton, founder of California’s Moontribe, who, wearing a t-shirt reading “Dance You Fuck” (I needed no such encouragement), not for the first time this season, unleashed a vocal sample care of Israeli duo Quantize which evoked the underlying theme of the year, week and day …. “heavy doses of Dimethyltryptamine”.

Photo by Jakob Kolar

Allow me to digress. Found in various plants, produced in the human brain (according to Rick Strassman in The Spirit Molecule, the pineal gland), and often smoked (“free based”) in a chillum with an effect lasting between 15-30 minutes, N,N-Dimethyltryptamine, or DMT, was spruiked by Terence McKenna as one of the most powerful vehicles for inter-dimensional transit. He wrote in True Hallucinations that its “strangeness and power so exceeded that of other hallucinogens, that di-methyltryptamine and its chemical relatives seemed finally to define, for our little circle at any rate, maximum exfoliation—the most radical and flowery unfolding—of the hallucinogenic dimension that can occur without serious risk to psychic and bodily integrity.” While William Burroughs reported traumatic experiences mainlining synthetic DMT at high doses, McKenna was a cheerleader for tryptamines, efforts echoing his personal commitment to spiritual technologies believed integral to humanity’s push toward liberation in transpersonal consciousness, and his indebtedness to Hermeticism, the search for the “philosopher’s stone” or lapis philosophorum—“nothing less”, he wrote in the same source, than “the redemption of fallen humanity through the respiritualization of matter” (1993: 77).

Since the 1990s, references to DMT escalated within psytrance productions—in which McKenna remains the most commonly sampled individual, his popularity proliferating following his death in 2000. Indeed, like a familiar from the beyond speaking on behalf of the multitudes who continue to encounter hyperspatial dimensions, his immortal brogue is stamped all over psytrance productions. For instance, on their debut self-titled album, 1200 Micrograms filter McKenna recollecting a life-changing experience from 1966: “I remember the very very first time I smoked DMT...” (“DMT”, TIP.World, 2002). Throughout the decade, artists projected McKenna as something resembling a seer. In 2001, Avihen Livne teemed up with Jörg Kessler and, as Cosma Shiva, producing “In Memory of Terence McKenna” on the EP by that name. The psychedelic dirge invokes McKenna: “vaporize it in a small glass pipe” … “a shaman is someone who has been to the end, is someone who knows how the world really works” … “what the alien voice in the psychedelic experience wants to reveal is …” and later the ghost of McKenna speaks in the unintelligible alien tongue he would sometimes deliver in his presentations.

With their material saturated in the effects of DMT and ayahuasca, the Shpongle-inspired ethnodelic outfit Entheogenic (Helmut Glavar and Piers Oak-Rhind) offer a sounding board for McKenna. The opening track on Spontaneous Illumination (C.O.R.N. Recordings, 2003), “Ground Luminocity”, heads off into a deep jungle vibe, with bird calls, insects buzzing and water flowing over rocks, all nurtured by flute and warm percussive lines. And like an epigram, the voice of McKenna: “The search for a doorway out of mundane experience …. Nature is the great visible engine of creativity” (Ott’s 2005 remix of “Ground Luminocity” [Entheogenic, Dialogue of the Speakers, Chillcode], finishes the sentence: “against which all other creative efforts are measured”). An apparent tribute to the seminal work co-authored by the McKennas, “Invisible Landscapes” begins with the bard: “life is a problem to be solved... its a conundrum. It’s not what it appears to be. There are doors. There are locks and keys. There are levels. And if you get it right, somehow it will give way to something extremely unexpected.” “Twilight Eyes” has a classic orchestral feel, with McKenna averring that “shamans in times and places gained their power through relationships with helping-spirits”, and with the line (from I Claudius) “I promise you, you’ll dream a different story altogether”, the listener is set adrift with McKenna standing on a ceaseless shoreline proclaiming “imagination, really, is the last frontier”, while waving the wayfarer off into deep dreamspace.

And now bathed in twilight, I am seated upon the ceaseless shoreline of Lake Idanha-a-Nova, coming up with knowing smiles and nodding heads, and shedding tears in recognition of a permanent impermanence. And like a comic book magi of sacred compounds attired in crinkled Flower of Life pajamas and appearing majestic against the fading light, before us dances nanobrain, our hyperdimensional adventure tour guide. “Acceptance”, “love” and "peace" are the words he'd repeated earlier before dispensing an alien brogue not dissimilar to that channeled by McKenna. It has been a long and tiring week at the pulsating heart of the world’s visionary dance festival, but the tide was in on the shores of possibility.

Photo by Jakob Kolar

I am compelled to take further stock of the cultural aesthetic in which we are implicated. This is a festival culture whose music has been, for at least fifteen years, quite literally smudged with DMT. While attempting to locate the first DMT-influenced track is probably futile, plunged into the Blakeian-infinite which they sought to resonate, The Infinity Project’s Mystical Experiences (Blue Room Released, 1995) is likely to have been partially influenced by DMT. The line “I met an alien with a blue aura” (from “Blue Aura”) is as proximate to DMT-space as Mary Poppins is to nanny duties. In 1997, the legendary Danish mind experimentalists Koxbox went “Searching for Psychoactive Herbs,” the ultimate track on their Dragon Tales (Blue Room Released), an inspired album cleaving away from the astral-planes drifters hallmarking the Goa tradition. With the track “D.M.Turner” (a tribute to author of The Essential Psychedelic Guide, D. M. Turner who drowned in his bath in 1996 after injecting a serious dose of ketamine), it appears that their search had not been in vein.

Forming the group DMT in 1998, members of the Goa trance royal family Raja Ram, Graham Wood, Greg Hunter, Johann Bley and Martin Glover produced the track “DMT” (Dragonfly Classix, Dragonfly Records). But it was Shpongle’s landmark Are You Shpongled? (Twisted Records, 1998) that had sung the ode to DMT. With its calypso bassline, “Divine Moments of Truth” features Raja Ram divulging his experience in DMT-space: “it was like a gigantic creature, that kept changing shape”.

Over the next ten years and more, references to DMT-space proliferated in music and cover art, in visionary art and event design. Whether in the work of Carey Thompson, whose gateway installation the DMTemple became, in 2006, a prominent feature at festivals in Europe and the United States, including Turkey's Soulclipse, Sunrise Celebration, The Glade and Burning Man, as well as Boom (a variation of which featured at Boom this year), or in the music itself, DMT had grown legion.

Photo by Boom Festival

The gateway concept has been especially appealing. Within the visionary arts and music community, DMT has been associated with a movement towards a state of grace, a reconcilement to one’s own physical demise, an encounter with ego-death and indeed mortality itself. Shpongle had the measure of this on Nothing Lasts … But Nothing is Lost (Twisted 2005) on which McKenna had the final word. On “Exhalation” there’s a break in Raja Ram’s flute and McKenna eventually exhales: “Nothing is lost...” The track “Nothing is Lost” from the same release is both a dirge sung for McKenna and an acceptance of impermanence, offering his master's voice: “Nothing lasts... nothing lasts. Everything is changing into something else. Nothing’s wrong. Nothing is wrong. Everything is on track. William Blake said nothing is lost and I believe that we all move on.” In this revelatory mode inspirants are challenged to find peace with the ultimate truth, to accept their inevitable complicity in the cycle of life/death. “Life must be the preparation for the transition to another dimension”, explained McKenna on “Molecular Superstructure” from the same album. With the expansion of personhood enabled by DMT, and with the now pervasive work of Alex Grey a popular means of expressing comfort with mortality (see especially his painting “Dying”), the barrier that separates life from death for us moderns grows ambiguous.

Alex Grey's "Dying".

But inside the 2010 Boom Festival, upon the edge of abduction, just where was all this heading fifteen years after The Infinity Project’s Mystical Experiences?

Blue Lunar Monkey’s “Mysterious Xperience” (Beyond 2012, 2008) spruiks like a carne: “it starts quite quickly and there’s quite a strong rush … and there’s quite a display of geometric, kaleidescopic visual imagery”. But then it grows introspective in ways expected upon a ride in an amusement park: “I think what may occur with DMT is that it opens specific doorways, which are otherwise closed. And through those doorways it is possible to make contact with external freestanding kinds of real experiences”. By 2009, the door to eternity seemed to have been left ajar. Hujaboy’s formulaic full-on “Liquifried” (VA, Planetary Service, Mechanik, 2009) offers American comedian Joe Rogan’s condensation of McKenna and Strassman: “it’s called dimethyltryptamine. It’s produced by your pineal gland. It’s actually a gland that’s in the center of your brain. It’s the craziest drug ever. It’s the most potent psychedelic known to man, literally. But the craziest thing about it is it’s natural and your brain produces it every night as you sleep. You know, when you sleep, during the time you’re in heavy REM sleep and right before death your brain pumps out heavy doses of dimethyltryptamine.” At this juncture, like a carne barking in a fairground midway, Rogan’s rant seemed to be on a high frequency play-loop. Thus, on “Freakstuff” (A Spark of Light, FX System), Brazilian Arthur Magno (aka Fractal Flame): “life is a massive fucking mystery. And there’s only a few different ways to really crack below the surface of that mystery. And the best way is psychedelics.” The same bark had been used by Hujaboy, accept that he decided to include “and the heavier the psychedelic, the better.” Mood Deluxe permitted Rogan another breathe: “And guess what? No one’s dying from psychedelics. All our thoughts on psychedelics are all based on bullshit propaganda, that you heard about people, you know, going crazy and losing their minds. You’re not gonna go crazy, you’re gonna go fucking sane” (on “Stealthy Fungus”, Divine Inventions, Liquid, 2008). An audio-billboard for the red pill, “DMT Molecule” by Mister Black includes material from the same monologue: “you should all smoke DMT and join my cult mother fuckers!” Rogan even made an encore on Fractal Flame’s “DMTrip”: “you take this shit and literally you are transformed into another fucking dimension.” And by the time Israeli duo Reshef Harari and Adi Ashkenazi (aka Quantize) arrived, any subtlety, subliminality and mysteriousness appears to have vaporized. Their “Dymethyltryptamine” [sic] (Borderline, Echoes Records, 2009), begins with the filtered voice of McKenna repeating “DMT” which quickens next to the pulse before Rogan bursts through with the new black: “heavy doses of dimethyltryptamine.”

You can almost smell the bravado, perhaps even thicker than the pungent vapour of DMT itself. But while some of this smacks of braggadocio as producers and DJs compete with one another for hardcore user status, the significance of this sampladelic tsunami should not be underestimated, for the writers of psychedelic sonic fiction (psy-fi) are channeling the zeitgeist. Whether in private alcoves by the beach or suburban terraces on summer afternoons, in special blends optimised for group sessions and indeed for the dance floor itself, DMT is the new black—if by which we understand “black” to be the equivalent of an inter-dimensional portal through which one vibrates in a depth-shifting coat of electric colours, and through which one grows connected to the ever-at-hand-albeit-illusive mysteries, the numinous that captivates one with an intrigue that fuels daily life, and fires a recognition that death and life are not unambiguously separate.

Over the past few years, this recognition has grown ever proximate care of changa, a DMT-blend first prepared and popularised in Australia, and now smoked on dance floors around the world. This short-lasting preparation, has inspired other DMT-enhanced leaf blends which may include, for instance, pau d’arco, damiana, pink lotus, calea zacatechichi, lions tail, calendula, passion flower—the latter being a MAO inhibitor rendering the experience like a “smokable ayahuasca” (see article on changa by Jon Hanna) and has even inspired an effort to establish psytrance as a “religion”.

Changa may be rooted in McKenna’s 1997 speaking tour of Australia. In his talks at various events, McKenna shared the wisdom that DMT could be harvested from alkaloids in local Acacia, and local psy-fi artists acknowledged the significance of the wattle, the national floral emblem (and local designation for Acacia). On “Burning Point” (Sun Control Species—Unreleased, 2004), Australian artist Drew Davidson (Sun Control Species) drops a McKenna sample pungent with the acrid vapour: “The national symbol of Australia is the wattle. It’s an Acacia. The Acacia ecology of Australia is jammed with DMT.”

The experience in DMT-space (especially the sonorous chirping of insects) had an early impact on trance music production in Australia, notably Space Tribe’s 12-inch Ultrasonic Heartbeat, which features “Cicadas on DMT” (Spirit Zone Recordings, 1996), and later the music of Insectoid. If Aldous Huxley had articulated that mescaline afforded a trek into the “Antipodes of the mind”, the “psychological equivalent of Australia” where “we discover the equivalents of kangaroos, wallabies, and duck-billed platypuses—a whole host of extremely improbably animals”, replete with exotic birdlife (kookaburras), insects, didjeridu and Aboriginal songlines, “Insecticide” and “Tribedelic Nomads (Animistic Mix)” (from Insectoid’s Groovology of the Metaverse, WMS Records, 1998) might have been the soundtracks to the antipodean trek from the Antipodes. “New Vistas” offers the pertinent sample to this remote viewing: “I feel that I am merely an agent, giving your some keys, which have been given to me, to pass on to you. These keys are to unlock doors out of your present prison. Doors opening in on new vistas. Doors beyond where you are now.” This material reeks of tryptamines and offers echoes of the experiment at La Chorrera down the Rio Putumayo in the Columbian Amazonas in 1971, on the subject of which the McKennas had written in The Invisible Landscape (1975: 109-110): “Because of the alien nature of the tryptamine trance, its seeming accentuation of themes alien, insectile, and futuristic, and because of previous experiences with tryptamine in which insectile hallucinatory transformations of human beings were observed, we were led to speculate that the role of the presence was somehow like that of an anthropologist, come to give humanity the keys to galactarian citizenship”. The national floral symbol of Australia seems to have been ingested, and the keys to the tryptamine palace handed over, in further work, such as the various artists producing on the Demon Tea label, whose compilation titles Oozie Goodness - The Eye Opening Elixir (1998) and Not My Cup Of Tea (2001) offer insight on this development.

At the lakefront laboratories downstream from these developments, we are intrepid Australians communing around a blend of our national emblem presided over by the alien anthropologist nanobrain. The blend is what he styles nanga, a potent changa derivative also dubbed aussiehuasca. It contains Peruvian Banisteriopsis caapi vine shavings which serve as an MAO inhibitor, and DMT "coaxed from Aussie acacialoids by alchemical maestros". As he informs me, "50/50 percentage ratio by weight, mixed with intent and charged with love ... vibrate to integrate, BOOM!"

Out here upon the frontiers of experimentation, we are in proximity to a transnational cult of seekership in which participants are exposed to new sensorial possibilities care of pungent blends and potent derivatives of changa ready-made for an interactive and inter-dimensional dance floor experience. McKenna had touted DMT as the fastest route to the Otherword which he characterised as "hyperdimensionality” or "hyperspace". As Otherworldly events, as hives of consciousness, psychedelic festivals expose participants to something akin to a Mystery School in Hyperspace. While none of this constitutes formal ritual, nor formal education, at Boom's Dance Temple we can read all about it in the music, and smell it in the morning air. We can see it in the animated movements of our fellow Temple worshippers hailing from a multitude of countries, and we feel it shaking hands with God under a misting system at 148 bpm.

With yet another promo for DMT, and Strassman’s book, take Swede Wizack Twizack’s (Tommy Axelsson) "Spirit Molecule” (Space No More, 2010). The effort to uncover this “strange chemical” and understand its capacity to replicate an experience identical “to events to come after life”, should not be undervalued. Opening the door to a psychedelic fairytale, “Spirit Molecule” sails off the map of terra-cognito to relate “the secret history” about which trance multitudes might approve: “since the dawn of time, man has used psychedelics. From the ancient myth of Adam and Eve until today … From the Eleusian rituals … to modern day ayahuasca parties, every society has used psychedelics”.

Speaking of mystery cults, a few days back I introduced a presentation by Chiara Baldini, my galactic sister (with whom I share a Dreamspell galactic signature: Yellow Planetary Seed). Chiara had been on site some two and a half months assisting in the preparation of the Liminal Zone, Boom’s educational arena. Part of an amazing bamboo structure called The Drop (which also included Boom's performing arts space, the Theatroom), the Liminal Zone has evolved into a significant portal of consciousness expansion, replete with ecological principles and visionary art, and which this year has been physically embraced by a Visionary Arts Gallery featuring work from, among others, Android Jones, Amanda Sage, Xavi and Carey Thompson (this years Arts Director).

Photo by Reagan Blundell.

Photos by Boom Festival

Photo by Jakob Kolar

Chiara had also become, over this period, an embedded historian, writing pieces for the Boom website, such as this essay exploring the significance of Shiva and Dionysus in Goa trance. She has also produced a chapter investigating the cult of Dionysus in contemporary psytrance for the collection I recently edited The Local Scenes and Global Culture of Psytrance. Her presentation “Boom vs Eleusis” was an entertaining and insightful speculation concerning the Mysteries of Eleusis and their contemporary equivalent. Connections with Eleusis, the two millennia long ancient Greek festival of initiation to the cult of Persephone and Demeter, have been repeatedly drawn within contemporary psytrance, especially among those who seek to return to states of connectedness and intentional ritual they perceive have been lost or forgotten.

It might be argued that the Boom Festival itself exemplifies this loss of direction or vision. While there may be a connection between the kykeon (the barley-derived drink knocked back by fasting initiates at Eleusis on the final night of the festival before they were exposed to the mysteries inside the Telesterion) and LSD-25 (whose psychoactive properties derive from alkaloids in the fungus ergot which may have parasitised the barley drunk at Eleusis), it could surely be argued that, unlike the mystery cults of ancient Greece, there is little evidence at Boom of singular mythical authorities whose stories govern the lives of its festal population. Also, with the prevalence of dodgy drugs, and with the proliferation of cocaine (at least that which is sold as “cocaine”) and questionable “MDMA” and other substances, liminars enter this arena with a high degree of risk. And not only that, with growing commercialization (e.g. Boom is selling coca-cola in 2010), along with the gangs of thieves ransacking tents on the final night of the event and throughout the festival, is it any wonder that critics have vent their spleens at the Boom organisation? Opponents have long included those who mount and attend Anti-Boom, an off-party situated across the lake from Boom for years? This year, Anti-Boom would actually be shut down by police after the first night of operation when they launched sonic salvos, like Boom-breaking audio fireworks, from their pirate enclave across the lake.

But for all the bitter broadsides, beauty, wonder and intention is in bountiful supply on the shores of lake Idanha-a-Nova. Over in the Healing Zone, there are multiple daily workshops, for instance, on sound healing, water practice, Qigong, meditation, yoga, sweat lodges, etc. And down in the Dance Temple individuals and crews of nationals from a multitude of states and altered states converge to conduct personal rituals of transformation, an exposure to Otherness rarely achieved elsewhere. It brings tears to your eyes, as it would to my Finnish companion on a bus back in Lisbon the day after. Tears of joy welled in his eyes as he recounted his first exposure to the Temple a week before, when he wept openly. These moments of transit neither possess nor require elaborate description or explanation, other than that the liminars habituating the torrent of bass and adrift on the mesmerising melodies within the Temple's Funktion One set up might announce little more than that they're having “the shit”. But we needn’t even measure this experience against the (limited) vocabulary supplied by participants, but by the preparations that those who descend upon this site in central western Portugal undertake to enable their exposure to the Mysteries. They make pilgrimage from all across the world (see Day One entrance video from BoomTV), participants from scores of countries, many hauling their buses, their funky motor homes and their arses great distances. For instance, I’ve had recounted to me tales of those who’ve trekked (ie. walked) across Europe to arrive at Boom, and others who have cycled. What's more, they expend considerable effort in acquiring the resources by which their exposure to Otherness is assisted.

Photo by Boom Festival

No, this is not the Telesterion at Eleusis. There is no unifying mythic system by which participants are able to interpret their visions or translate their altered states. Not a ceremonial occasion, in the shamanic-anarchist style advocated by McKenna the Dance Temple facilitates a multitude of private encounters with the numinous, multiple states of entrancementl. And there are no heirophants, just as there are no singular types or sources of consciousness alterants—no unifying symbols, such as the head of barley a la Eleusis. But among this literal “alphabet soup” of research chemicals—which clearly retains the “meat and three vege” of LSD (commonly signified by the image of its synthesizer, Albert Hofmann), cannabis sativa (whose leaf is a ubiquitous symbol of altered states), psilocybin (with the image of the mushroom axiomatic to alterity) and MDMA (the “love” drug)—we find that DMT has evolved as an authority unto its own, whose private and public teachings are extolled in the sonic mythography and visionary artistry of our times. For the initiated, the numinous affect of usage precipitates reverence, and entire cults of adoration develop in which this plant matter and its psychoactive fruits are venerated. With DMT, since these “fruits” derive from plants with relatively indistinct features, their adoration is rarely expressed in iconography, but is known in its pungent vapour, the olfactory memory of which signals one’s own connection with the Other World, and to those with which one has been vaporised.

Disembarking upon this beachhead of possibility, gazing into the Otherworld, it occurred to me that DMT does not enable access to The Mysteries, like a puzzle to be re/solved, a game to be completed, a lock to be opened, a story to conclude. Indeed, solving mysteries is the conceit of the old scientific model. As we subject the unknown to possession, measurement and control, mystery grows ever more illusive, receding from view like the Elves vanishing to Valinor. And it further occured to me, above the clouds on a flight from Lisbon to Budapest post-Boom, that the puzzle-like objects I had been presented with in a nanga session on the shores of Lake Idanha-a-Nova were not to be “solved”, cracked open, uncovered, but to be recognised as signs of the greater Mystery in which I was implicated, in which we were soaked—fragments of the universe in which we’re a part. Here, the gift is that recognition.

Photos by Boom Festival

Many thank yous to my traveling and camping companions, especially Nano, Chiara, Aleaha, Paris, Damo, along with Marco, Karl, Graziella and all the organizers and participants of Boom 2010, all accomplices at the scene of the sublime. Special thanks to Dick (Maestro) Trevor. Thanks also to Boti at whose apartment in Budapest I completed this, and to the photographers whose stunning work is reproduced here: Jakob Kolar, João Curiti, João Prata, and Rui Ribiere (for Boom Festival), Reagan Blundell, Noam Chojnowski, and Aaron Gautschi. Parts of the story are extracted from my forthcoming book Global Tribe: Spirituality, Technology and Psytrance.

Photo by Reagan Blundell.

Photo by Noam Chojnowski

Black Pearl Eclipse Adventure, Cook Islands

2010-07-27T08:39:00.012+02:00

I rose from the deck to carve a few shapes in the night.

And made a quick meal of it.

Lurching aft, and then to starboard, it took all my effort to avoid shirt-fronting the subs and stumble overboard without a trace.

I've waded through effluvious moshpits across Europe, parlayed with psychedelic bogans from Wonthaggi, and thrown it all in with jihadi of doof and other party fundamentalists in locations too numerous to mention. But what could have prepared me for this new peril, this eightball odyssey on the High Sea, this berth on a ship of divine fools?

Sailing south-east in the Cook Islands, north-east of New Zealand, we were charting the frontiers of dance, scanning the horizon for the perfect rave. But like a frumptious colony of crustacea, my colleagues in extreme recreation clung to all that was available, including the makeshift dance floor, resembling, at times, an incident room. This was no time for showcasing new form, for aerial hieroglyphs of the kind one might inscribe when, as in this case, broadsided by quality sound. Like pale-faced practitioners in an unorthodox church of dance, we rode it out, on a steady 145 BPM at 30 knots.

We were fifty-odd adventurers, from Melbourne by the most part, habitués of that city’s psytrance and related scenes. Expatriates, world travelers, mavens of mischief and experience seekers hunting one of the greatest prizes of all: totality, that cosmic vibe that is activated by a total solar eclipse.

Image by Jacq Smith

It was the morning of July 11, and I had boarded the Tekou Maru II, an Island Trader with eight crew which had now steamed over 100 nautical miles south-east of Rarotonga. Months earlier, I’d enlisted with the Black Pearl Eclipse Adventure, a ten day journey from Melbourne to Rarotonga whose highlight was a sea-faring trip to intercept with the line of totality arching across the South Pacific. Over the previous week, I had joined my rogue brethren in bonhomie and compatriots in eclipse chasing and duty free drinking who occupied the Raro Backpackers on the western beachfront of the main island. Small groups split off to explore the island, snorkel reefs, go ocean fishing (providing dinner for beach feast parties on two occasions), climb mountains or chill on the decks of beach-front bungalows.

Images by Jacq Smith

Others climbed to the base of Te Rua Manga, “the Needle”, which afforded majestic views over Rarotonga. Our group arrived on the island alongside other consortiums of scientists, totality freaks and amateur astronomers who had travelled to the Cook Islands to observe the eclipse—such as the 500 who would sail to the island of Mangaia, which, alongside Easter Island (Rapa Nui), was reported to offer one of the best land-based vantage points for observing the eclipse on its 11,000 km journey over the South Pacific (cloud cover would dash the hopes of those who travelled to Mangaia).

Image by Martin Heine

To Keu, our curious young neighbour who was drawn over to marvel at the spectacle of the freaks now inhabiting the Raro backpackers and breaking-in a new sound system far surpassing anything he'd heard or seen before, we were an unfathomable fraternity of foreigners - in his amazement, "totally random". Be that as it may, our purpose on the island was far from random.

And not self-obsessed. On Friday night, Black Pearl held a benefit night at the shorefront club Rehab, where several DJs performed (Jules, Shadow FX, Ed Motive and Doobie) raising $700 for a local charity supporting islanders suffering from industrial and road accidents.

But the main performance was a few days off, and my ragtag posse of shadow dancers were preparing for the jump-off point. For my own part, I volunteered for this mission with two successful sorties stenciled on my fuselage. The first near Lindhurst, South Australia, in early December 2002. The second near Antalya, southern Turkey, Easter 2006. Both total solar eclipses were celebrated at electronic dance music festivals—predominantly psytrance—mounted on the line of totality. Such events have been held since at least November 2nd 1994, the date of the “eclipse rave” in Chile, near the coastal city of Arica at the edge of the Atacama. That event signaled the birth of a highly specialised traveler phenomenon. That moment when the Moon’s perfect union with the Sun activates the fleeting display of its golden corona had made deep grooves upon my soul in these ecstatic social contexts, with this cosmic event enervating the social experience, and the orgiastic sociality of the festival enabling an intimate connection between those who shared the experience. It was, therefore, a total experience where the umbra of the total solar eclipse crossfades with the ecstatic aesthetic of the dance party: a cosmic vibe sought by totality freaks who hunt this magic across the planet.

On Rarotonga, Saturday July 10, every thing had been set in motion to rendezvous with totality. John-Paris McKenzie, operator of Black Pearl Eclipse Adventures, is no stranger to the cosmic vibe, to being gowned in the golden fleece. He had notched up six previous total solar eclipse events in locations the world over and had been gowned in totality more than twice as long as any one else on board. The totality freak’s freak, Paris had fitted out the Island Trader with a quality sound system, hired DJs/producers (including Shadow FX, who has a reputation for driving women crazy, as seen in footage (compiled at Boom 2008) reproduced on his website, the gregarious Ed Motive and the viceroy of vigilance Aaron Smiles.

Shadow FX (James Hayes)

A dance floor had been fashioned on the freight deck, and there was even a chill area aft. There was substantial risk involved in this venture, perhaps greater than that faced by the Pedas-Sigler family of educators who initiated formal eclipse cruises—on ocean liners—back in the early 1970s. Much depended upon the weather. Would the sea be rough? Would clouds occlude the eclipse? Would voyagers grow mutinous?

While there had been a severe storm the night we arrived on Raro, the winds had now grown comparably light. But out on the open sea, as the Tekou Maru II cut through swell upon swell and Venus undulated off the port bow, many a voyager’s stomach was exposed to turbulence. As the night air grew rank with unsettled guts and an unremitting torpor, these Melbournites were rewriting the meaning of the “Melbourne shuffle”: long periods of motionlessness followed by rapid bursts of activity on the dance floor, which in this case involved the rapid freighting of one’s stomach contents into buckets and over the rails—a transference of energy kicked-off by one of the locals, the ship’s nurse, who gave it all up soon after our vessel left the harbour at Rarotonga. Many passengers capitulated in similar fashion throughout the night, as the roiling progressive psychedelic builds played by Brendan Armstrong, Tony Loucas and Aaron Smiles were met with a chunderous applause. Sick!

Images by Martin Heine

At around 8.00 AM on Sunday July 11, we had sailed into the Straights of the Non-Ordinary. My guts ceased churning as swells rode against the hull no more. It took me a while to recognise that the ship’s engines had stopped. I wheeled about to take in 360 degrees of ocean horizon. We were now drifting in The Path, an unusual dawn on any seas, high or low, an uncharted region apparently remedying nocturnal nauseas and maritime maladies. As the night lifted in a floating world where the veils were growing thinner, anxieties and troubles that had mounted over the past weeks and the previous night were rapidly evaporating. While the sky to the east remained cloudy, with the assistance of my special issue eclipse glasses it became apparent that the Moon was moving into alchemical alignment with the Sun. Voyagers were awakening to greet the cone of shadow racing across the Earth toward us. And as the Sun came to form a crescent off the starboard bow, it grew evident that the cumulus curtains were parting across the proscenium arches of the heavens and we privileged avatars were minutes away from one of the greatest spectacles on Earth.

We were on a bearing to collide with the cosmos, and what’s-more, had tickets to front row seats. As show time approached, awareness of duration had vaporized, though it must have been around 8:20 AM by which time the music was switched off, and our prow was in direct alignment with a Sun occluding Moon.

Images by Tony Loucas

Inside this time-out-of-time so remote from land and routine consciousness, cosmic travelers were awash in a heavenly ambiance. New music was now being broadcast from the distant horizon, an overture that cannot be sampled, reproduced or replayed with any accuracy. Cries rose from the decks as awe-struck and bespectacled voyagers gained every vantage to absorb a sea of shadows that now came flooding over them like a tsunami. At this numinous threshold in space-time a divine chorus lifted me off the deck.

Image by Tony Loucas

I was not alone in the ascension. Voyagers, some hobbling out from the cabins aft, some rubbing sleep from their eyes and gaining the observation deck, others hunkered down on the dance floor, and others still fumbling with camera equipment, became exposed to a transfigurement routinely reported since Eighteenth Century astronomers predicted this cosmic event. The jubilant reaction of eclipse voyagers is reminiscent of that described by Andrew Weil who was in Miahuatlán, Oaxaca, Mexico on March 7, 1970, as the umbra passed over the villagers, who broke into a “spontaneous ovation of the heavens”. The description can be found in Weil’s Marriage of the Sun and Moon: A Quest for Unity in Consciousness, where it is told that the total eclipse, which lasted over three minutes, was an experience, and held an impact, that was immeasurable. For those moments in the umbra, the present lasted for a prolonged duration. Weil explained that there was a quality to those minutes “that must be like the feeling in the eye of a hurricane. After all the dramatic changes of accelerating intensity, everything stopped: There was an improbable sense of peace and equilibrium. Time did not flow.” Indeed, it was three-and-a-half-minutes of clock time incomparable to any duration he’d previously known.

Weil went on to offer an explanation for why the people of Miahuatlán were getting high. At this privileged juncture in time and space where humans share in the perfect alignment of Earth, Moon and Sun with their own bodies, “to participate in that moment of uncanny equilibrium is to have one’s faith strengthened in the possibility of equilibrium and to experience the paradox that balance and stillness are to be found at the heart of all change”. Furthermore, the union of the Sun and the Moon is recurrent in philosophies and myths world-wide, that are “symbolic of the union of conscious and unconscious forces within the human psyche that must take place if one is to become whole.” Typically accessed via meditation, drugs, hypnosis, trance and other techniques, those hidden realms of consciousness occulted to us in our daily lives, are said to be perfectly represented by the corona of the Sun in union with the Moon, which is also recognized as a union of masculine and feminine energies. Thus, a total solar eclipse signifies an alchemical exchange of solar and lunar phases of consciousness, with totality contextualizing something of a peak psychocultural experience.

By extension, the integral view provides perspective on why this cosmic synchronicity appears to have held such significance for the global psychedelic trance community, where, since the mid 1990s, dance parties and festivals have been mounted on the line of totality, growing in size and proportion with each event. But there is something more going on, since this perfect alignment does not simply involve a line-up of the Earth, Moon and Sun with the individual Self, but potentially of manifold selves, a multitude. And so the Sun’s perfect corona signals an opening, a portal that opens not simply to the possibilities of individual human creativity, but to novel forms of social experimentation. There can be no denying that the experience, which attracted dozens of people from varying backgrounds, many strangers to one another, had the effect of unifying many who came, witnessed and were transfigured.

In those social events that have grown on the line of totality over the past decades, fellowship in dance has been integral to the experience of the eclipse. It might be argued that since there was barely any dancing, not of the kind where dancers can maintain trance-like states, along with the contents of their stomachs, the voyage was missing that special vibe. Yet this fails to capture the significance of the experience, for the sound system, a quality rig with quality selections and performances, remained integral to the experience, offering voyagers a soundtrack to a trip that, given its remoteness from land and other people, resembled a space opera, with the grand symphony itself beginning after 8:00 AM Sunday morning when the ship’s engine was shut down, the sound system was turned off, and the cosmic music began.

Image by Tony Loucas

An unusual extravagance perhaps, but it was in this liminality, after the system was shut off and before the afternoon tunes appeared care of Ed Motive and Doobie and Rodney, that the sound system made its real significance felt. At this oceanic crossroads, the silence grew louder, the shadows harboured an alien glow and my compatriots were beholden with the shining appearance of the Pirates of Penzance. And it could not have been so without the progressive psychedelic trance swabbing the deck all night long care of Tony Loucas, Aaron Smiles and Shadow FX.

Still aglow from the experience, fellow voyager, Kitty Forest, put it like this:

Shadow FX cued a perfectly moving version of 'Somewhere Over the Rainbow' as the stars of the show slipped gently behind soft cloud and I wept again with gratitude. How easily it could all have been missed and Mother had reminded us one final time it was her decision, never ours, to view this eclipse. We had all taken a huge gamble and traveled long and hard on the off chance we would witness a three minute natural marvel. And we won.

In the wake of a Moon-occulted Sun, no voyager aboard this victorious floating theatre could now be uneducated to the meaning of the name of our vision quest: Black Pearl, in the realisation that the valuable black pearl harvested in the region was just now mirrored in the morning sky.

Image by Tony Loucas

Yet the cosmic black pearl is rarer than any saltwater gemstones of the region. Unlike the gem harvested from the seabed, this “black pearl” held no monetary value, other than the relatively cheap cost of the adventure itself. No exchange value. The experience of singularity encountered when the Sun aligns with the Moon in a perfect marriage where the observer must also be a party to this alignment at a precise terrestrial location, holds a value that can hardly be measured, a value that is, at its foundations, spiritual.

Image by Martin Heine

Returning to Rarotonga, as hunter-voyagers, we had collectively harpooned a total solar eclipse off Mangaia - among the greatest of catches for experiential big game hunters, now obtained to distribute among our various tribes and communities.

Fellowship of the Corona.

Black Pearl Footage as screened on Raro TV (footage by Vidman).

Thanks to Paris for organising Black Pearl, and to my brothers in the PLA and all voyagers for accompanying me on this adventure. Thanks also to the people of Rarotonga, Pa the mountain guide and the captain and crew of the Tekou Maru II. And thanks to all the photographers for their disciplined attention to detail.

Technomad Book Launch: San Francisco : Soul of the City

2010-07-26T10:15:00.001+02:00

Friday, JULY 30th 9:00pm – 10:00pm
1015 Folsom, 1015 Folsom Avenue San Francisco, CA

Book Launch for Graham St John’s Technomad: Global Raving Countercultures.
Panel discussion on San Francisco, Burning Man and our contributions to
the Global Tribal Revival. Graham will read from his landmark book and
discuss the contributions that Bay Area groups and projects have made to
the international rave and festival culture, including a panel
discussion with: Marian Goodell (Burning Man), Michael Gosney (Digital
Be-In, Earthdance) and Brad Olson (How Weird Street Faire/CCC)

The Launch is part of SOUL OF THE CITY: Transforming Metropolis at 1015 Folsom 8:00pm - 3:00am

A benefit for Entheon Village, Red Lightning, Sacred Spaces and Feed the Artists at Burning Man 2010 - Celebrating the Evolution of the Revolution

More info

The Local Scenes and Global Culture of Psytrance

2010-06-18T06:36:00.002+02:00

Announcing my new edited collection: The Local Scenes and Global Culture of Psytrance

This lively textual symposium offers a rich harvest of formative research on the culture of global psytrance (psychedelic trance). As the first book to address the diverse transnationalism of this contemporary electronic dance music phenomenon, the collection hosts interdisciplinary research attending to psytrance as a product of intersecting local and global trajectories. With coverage of scenes in Goa, the UK, Israel, Japan, Italy, the US, Portugal, The Czech Republic and Australia, the collection features a dozen chapters from scholars researching psytrance in worldwide locations, employing various methods, within multiple disciplines. With chapters offering significant contributions to our understanding of globalization and music cultures, scene demise and transformation, ephemeral and cosmopolitan assemblages, counterculture and paradox, psychedelicization and genre, virtual tribes and the Internet, the carnivalesque and the aesthetics of nonsense, festivals and the logics of sacrifice, and other topics, Psytrance will strike interest across anthropology, sociology and studies in popular music, culture, media, history and religion.

Contents
Psytrance: An Introduction. Graham St John
I Goa Trance
1. Goa is a State of Mind: On the Ephemerality of Psychedelic Social Emplacements. Luther Elliott
2. The Decline of Electronic Dance Scenes: The Case of Psytrance in Goa. Anthony D’Andrea
3. The Ghost of Goa Trance: A Retrospective. Arun Saldanha
II Global Psytrance
4. Infinite Noise Spirals: Psytrance as Cosmopolitan Emotion. Hillegonda Rietveld
5. Psychedelic Trance Music Making in the UK: Rhizomatic Craftsmanship and the Global Market Place. Charles de Ledesma
6. Re-evaluating Musical Genre in UK Psytrance. Robin Lindop
7. (En)Countering the Beat: Paradox in Israeli Psytrance. Joshua I. Schmidt
III Liminal Culture
8. DemenCZe: Psychedelic Madhouse in the Czech Republic. Botond Vitos
9. Dionysus Returns: Tuscan Trancers and Euripides’ The Bacchae. Chiara Baldini
10. Weaving the Underground Web: Neotribalism and Psytrance on Tribe.net. Jenny Ryan
11. Narratives in Noise: Reflexivity, Migration and Liminality in the Australian Psytrance Scene. Alex Lambert
12. Liminal Culture and Global Movement: The Transitional World of Psytrance. Graham St John

Reviews

“Psytrance is an intriguing transnational phenomenon for anyone interested in popular music, subcultures, and alternative spiritualities and lifestyles. Although still relatively unexplored, it is an increasingly significant area of study in Sociology, Cultural Studies, Popular Music Studies and Religious Studies. A dynamic feature of a multi-faceted, global, psychedelic occulture, psytrance presents the scholar with a fascinating, if bewildering array of musicological, cultural, and spiritual confluences. Edited by Graham St John, the foremost EDMC theorist, this stimulating collection of essays by some of the key researchers in the field provides a genuinely insightful and engaging contribution to the study of psytrance, which students, tutors, and researchers will be turning to for many years to come. I warmly and enthusiastically welcome it.” --Christopher Partridge, Professor of Religious Studies, Department of Politics, Philosophy and Religion, Lancaster University, UK

“The Local Scenes and Global Culture of Psytrance is a rich collection, full of pieces that combine the results of detailed fieldwork with up-to-date theorizing. I particularly like the way this volume goes beyond the longstanding preoccupation of popular music scholars with subcultural expression, and into a whole set of other, interdisciplinary issues. This book is very much about music, but it also tackles such phenomena as the global “festivalization” of culture, emerging forms of music-based religiosity, transformations in the nature of cultural labour, and shifts in the social meaning of travel. Psytrance comes across here as much more than just one more interesting musical niche. Interweaving technologies and bodies, the archaic and the contemporary, the local and the cosmopolitan, psytrance condenses within itself many of the key cultural dynamics of our time. The articles gathered here delve into those dynamics with skill and commitment, and the result is a book that should interest any scholar of present-day cultural expression.” --Will Straw, Professor, Department of Art History and Communication Studies, McGill University, Canada

“Graham St John has assembled a thought-provoking and rewarding collection of essays that explores the rarely considered musical and cultural practices that make up psytrance. Dedicated to its local variants and its global tendrils, this collection frames psytrance through scenes, subcultures, neo-tribes, political economies, cultural politics, and aesthetics, as well as movement and mobility, giving us an engaging contribution to the nascent study of electronic dance music cultures.” -- Geoff Stahl, Victoria University of Wellington, Aotearoa - New Zealand

Purchasing the book

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MardiGrass

2010-05-06T13:03:00.018+02:00

Last Sunday, I climbed down out of the hills.

I bore witness to the annual Hemp Parade, part of MardiGrass, Nimbin, Australia.

The protestival had its inception on May 1 1993, inaugurated by the Nimbin HEMP Embassy in response to years of repression met daily by users of cannabis. As a weekend-long schedule of public events, which emerged as a legitimate platform of protest and celebration in response to an incident in March 1993 when eggs and toilet paper rained down on the police station, MardiGrass enables the inhabitants of Nimbin and the surrounding region to make a peaceful spectacle of themselves, and their cause.

Eighteen years later, the event is a unique festival by world standards, attracting thousands from around the region and indeed around the world.

By the time I lurched into town with friends Kathleen and Kenneth I'd missed the infamous 4:20 mass "enlightenment" and Kombi Konvoy which rolled through town on Saturday.

Officially known as the Rally and Parade for Cannabis Law Reform, the Sunday parade ends with a rally down at Peace Park near the site of the 1973 Aquarius Festival that had transformed the town into Australia's alternative capital. Down at the park, speeches would be made and prizes awarded for the winners of the Hemp Olympix.

But before that, there was the parade of the outraged and the outrageous. Here's a few shots:

The event will be held, so say its organisers, "until the war is over".

Cosmic Trance, the Hero’s Journey and the Overview Effect

2010-02-28T06:32:00.011+01:00

Lately, I’ve been hearing a lot of voices ….

Like “we journey from ignorance to knowledge. Growth reflects the advancement of the species. The exploration of the cosmos is a voyage of self-discovery.”

I heard it on Cosmosis' “Self-Discovery” on Fumbling For The Funky Frequency (2009).

It was Carl Sagan, lifted from the TV Series Cosmos.

Other voices I’ve been getting are right out of the history of science fiction cinema and, further out... from astronauts participating in NASA's Apollo Space Programme.

They are the (male) voices that together speak the tongue of cosmic trance – which is the heart of the Goa trance phenomenon - and remnant within psytrance. They are the voices of a psychedelic astrofuturism, in which Space Age mediations have been intercepted by sonic and visionary artists repurposing popular culture in the pursuit of progressive evolutionism.

But don't let me get too far ahead of myself.

In Space Age popular music forms, from cosmic rock to cosmic jazz, funk and ambient, outer-space is the place that exiles of varying backgrounds have fictitiously habituated in order to resolve crises in the human condition, to achieve self-transcendence, space becoming a theatre of possibility, a stage for the performance of alien-nation, a theme that I’ve explored in a chapter for tobias c. van Veen’s forthcoming collection Afrofuturism: Interstellar Transmissions from Remix Culture (Wayne State University Press).

But that's part of the broader story. Here I want to make a few statements about how extra-terrestrial space became a source of gnostic transcendence within Goa trance. Reproduced in samples from cinematic science fiction and from NASA dialogue, in psychedelic trance, spaceflight is a narrative device, perhaps what Kodwo Eshun would call “conceptechnics”, for inner travail, the avatar’s quest, the hero’s journey.

The “space” for this journey is external and internal, extraterrestrial and psychosomatic. A cosmic threshold. Within the psychedelic space programme the realms of the physical and the imaginal interface such that space becomes the terrain across which one physically, or within which one psychically, travels. And the farther from routine consciousness (and one’s home) one ranges, the more other one might become from one’s self. While travel in exotic locales might potentiate self-transcendence, there is no farther to sojourn from one’s ontological routine than the space beyond the Earth’s atmosphere. As it transpires, the exosphere was first subject to human exploration and conquest in the period that LSD (and other techniques of self-expansion, astral traveling and other out-of-body experiences like meditation, yoga, and isolation tanks) achieved popularity. From the early psychedelic period, the LSD “trip” gave users the impression of floating in space, a disembodied sensibility imagined with the assistance of astronauts and cosmonauts operating in weightless conditions care of the earliest NASA and Soviet missions into orbit transmitted into homes via television. If, as Victor Turner had argued, marginal spatial conditions are essentially liminal conditions, with the advent of the Space Age humans were accessing the most physically marginal (and thus liminal) space to date.

Outer-space, then, if we were to continue in Turner’s idiom, would be a “realm of pure possibility”. While the desire for expatriation from the ravages of modernity saw freaks make exodus to Goa, India, in the 1960s and 1970s, and thereby extend the then well-exhausted western frontier into the East, they did so at a time when manned missions beyond the Kármán line offered a new frontier of research and experimentalism, later revisited, remixed and repurposed by the scriptwriters of Goa trance.

This explains why, in Goa trance, journeys in space are deeply imbued with Eastern mysticism, Hindu iconography, yogic practice, and the possibility of merging with the divine. The galactic Orientation was apparent, for instance, in the work of Jörg Kessler, label manager at Shiva Space Technology, whose compilation The Digital Dance of Shiva (1999) features on its cover art a cyborg-alien Shiva dancing across what appears to be a star gate, or The Overlords, whose cover design for All the Naked People (1994) featured three sadhus and an astronaut.

While overt Hindu symbolism (i.e. the Om symbol) might have lost popularity by the late-1990s as the scene receded from Goa, producers and psychonauts were remaining true to their roots. Thus the Oming sequences on prodigious Israeli outfit Astral Projection’s space-operatic “Cosmic Ascension” (on Dancing Galaxy, 1997) left little doubt that the launch sequence for their full-powered mission was initiated on the subcontinent. When Gilbert Thévenet, producing as Asia 2001, projected a violet skinned hairless and earless alien with large almond eyes and vestigial lower face gracefully seated in lotus position with its bulbous head at the centre of a mandala on the cover of Psykadelia (1997):

or when the cover of Astrological’s Space Odyssey (1998) featured a Buddha statue with a fleet of flying discs appearing in a red sky enlivened by an electrical storm, we had arrived at the juncture of two critical paths of self-discovery: the cosmic and yogic odysseys.

Within cosmic trance, the desire for expatriation is transmuted into the fixation with launch into the zero-gravity of space, the “final frontier” (a phrase also applied to the mind). We can locate the launch sequence on the "Live at Trancentral" version of what is sometimes claimed to be the first Goa trance release, the KLF’s “What Time Is Love?” (1990): “Okay here, we’re gonna give you a countdown... 4, 3, 2, 1, Fire!” On their seminal “Zero”, Astral Projection (The Astral Files, 1996) marked that moment of release where the crew of Apollo 8—whose 21st December 1968 mission was the first manned space voyage to escape the Earth’s gravitational field—have completed their check-lists, initiated launch sequence and, under the power of a Saturn V rocket, cleared the tower. At maximum thrust “Houston” reads the voyagers “loud and clear”. In the 1995 release, “Hypersphere” (Hypnorhythm) French outfit Transwave were anticipating launch phase with the repeated announcement from the film Dune: “31 seconds and we’re going for auto-sequence start”. Here countdown sequences narrativize quantized rhythms intended, with the assistance of carefully measured micrograms of psychoactive compound, to effect consciousness alteration: lift off. The result was immeasurable: “Boy, it’s just beautiful up here looking out the window – it’s just really fantastic” (Apollo 16 Commander John W. Young, from KLF's “What Time is Love? (Live at Trancentral)”.

“Imagine yourself in infinite space floating.” This call to disembodiment made by Space Tribe on “All You Need Is Spirit And Nothing” (The Ultraviolet Catastrophe, 1997), evokes the euphoric sensation produced from meditation, isolation tanks and psychedelics. The flotation bath had been entered several years earlier: “I felt like I was flying …. I was flying, very slowly flying, high in the sky.” The line is repeated onboard The Infinity Project’s cosmic “Uforica” (on Stimuli / Uforica, 1994). Emerging in 1989, the formative Goa act (with Ron Rothfield, aka Raja Ram, and Graham Woods) felt compelled to orchestrate a sense of meditative weightlessness through space tropes. Their earlier acid techno-trance journey “Zero Gravity” (Tribadelic Meltdown EP, 1992) features an astronaut reporting on the sensation of “perfect zero gravity”, stating “you can feel it shake, there’s a real strong vibration”.

The Infinity Project's most common source, however, was Star Trek, probably the single most sampled media-source in psytrance. “Time and Space” from the white label Time and Space EP (1993) reproduced Captain Kirk repeating “I was floating in time and space”. Lifting a line from Star Trek X: Nemesis, “Well, it seems as though we are truly sailing into the unknown”, among psytrance’s most enduring acts, Electric Universe (“Acidance”, Cosmic Experience, 2004), steers the ship into the infinite and beyond.

The Infinity Project’s Time and Space EP also possessed the untitled track (“B2”) featuring space-avatar Dave Bowman’s eureka moment from Arthur C. Clarke’s epic novel and unedited versions of Stanley Kubrick’s concurrent 1968 classic 2001: A Space Odyssey: “My god, it’s full of stars!” Featuring one of the most powerfully gnostic narratives in cinema, 2001 is among the most sampled films in psytrance.

The space odyssey preoccupied many of the early Goa producers. Hallucinogen's (aka Simon Posford) notable “Alpha Centauri” (on his first twelve-inch alongside the momentous “LSD”, 1994) was a voyage to that constellation. Laughing Buddha (Jeremy Van Kemen and Bill Halsey) embarked on an ethereal quest for “Andromeda” (on their first 12-inch Infinite Depths, 1995). Prana were thrust into “Primal Orbit” (Primal Orbit EP, 1996). And Juno Reactor, the ongoing collaborative project formed in 1993 by Ben Watkins, references the third and final part of 2001: “Jupiter: Beyond the Infinite” on the 1995 album Beyond the Infinite.

Within all of recorded human history, space has been a source of awe, its depths occulting mysteries of origin and destination, genesis and apocalypse, with the mid-20th Century penetration of space providing an allegory for percipience, the journey into the mind. Ever since Timothy Leary gave weight to the off-planetary odyssey as the path towards the “universe of pure energy” - his space conquest-dependent consciousness evolution constituting a strange mutation of astrofuturist salvationism promoted by visionaries like Clarke and Robert R. Heinlein - a cosmic consciousness has endured among the space-cadets and astro-boys drawn to Goa trance. For these psychedelic warriors, NASA’s Apollo lunar program held appeal in storying the journey. But while NASA was developing science and harnessing technology with the purpose of launching humankind beyond the exosphere, visionary artists were repurposing audio technologies to enable exploration of inner space.

A Space Odyssey

Found on the first Goa-Head compilation (1996), the whisper repeated on Power Source’s classic “Granada”, “take me to the moon”, is not an uncommon refrain. The first full album release from Juno Reactor, Transmissions (1993), was a momentous realisation of this desire. With the Apollo lunar program stamped all over the album, you can imagine early VJs synchronising images of moonwalking astronauts to “Luna-tic”, a track receiving eerie transmissions from Apollo 17 astronauts struggling an improvised duet while bouncing across the lunar surface on the final Apollo mission in 1972. The track is cut with dialogue between Earth based NASA support crew member, Anthony England, and Apollo 16 Commander John W. Young, on the lunar surface:

England: Hello Orion, this is Houston.

Young: Hi there. We lost you for a while.

England: Yeah, we sure did.

It’s a curious choice of exchange, but one which I feel implies that there can be no discovery of one’s self, without its eclipse. The dissolution of rational consciousness and of base-ego associated with trance is analogised in the space mission, where “mission control” (“Houston”) signifies rationality, the consciousness from which explorers seek distance and with which they may experience patchy communications while in “orbit”. Such flights from, and obscure transmissions with, consciousness are enhanced by effects amplifying the risks involved for the traveler. Some fifteen years later, this became superabundant on Nanospheric (2008), the work of independent German producer Lars Goossens (aka Cybernetika).

On the opening “Plasmoid”, below a deep pounding space atmospherics a garbled dialogue is reproduced from the infamous 1970 Apollo 13 mission, which was crippled by an explosion damaging the command module Odyssey, resulting in a loss of oxygen and electrical power.

Command Module pilot John L. “Jack” Swigert: “Okay, Houston, we’ve had a problem here.”

Houston: “This is Houston. Say again please.”

Commander James A. Lovell: “Houston, we’ve had a problem. We’ve had a main B bus undervolt.”

Houston: “Roger. Main B undervolt.”

Lunar Module pilot Fred W. Haise: “That jolt must have rocked the sensor on - see now - oxygen quantity 2. It was oscillating down around 20 to 60 percent. Now it’s full-scale high.”

Lovell: “Okay. And we’re looking at our service module RCS helium 1. We have, B is barber poled and D is barber poled, helium 2”

At this point “Plasmoid” orchestrates unmistakable awe. Adrenaline rushes as pressure is lost, a sense of hurtling out into the vacuum arising in simultaneity with the realisation of the potential for permanent disconnection from base. But competency holds up, amid barber-poled and inscrutably technical dialogue.

Hasie: “Okay, Houston, are you still reading Apollo 13?”

Houston: “That’s affirmative, we’re reading you. We’re trying to come up with some good ideas here for you.”

Houston: “13, Houston. We’d like you to verify a couple of readings for us. We’d like the nitrogen pressure on fuel cell 1, we need the oxygen pressure on fuel cell 2.”

Haise: “Okay. Nitrogen on 1 and oxygen on 2—is that correct?”

Houston: “Negative. Oxygen on 3.”

Haise: “Okay. (pause) Okay. Systems test 1-A says zip, and 2 baker which is 3 oxygen says point 6.”

Houston: “2 baker says point 6 and say again the other one.”

Haise: “Fuel cell 1 nitrogen reads zero.”

Houston: “Roger, zero.”

Cybernetika’s curtain raiser sets a course towards peril. Oxygen levels are low, breathing is abnormal, and in the remainder of the album one plunges into a chorus of spectral noise. In an exhilarating tale of danger and ingenuity followed closely by TV audiences world-wide, guided by ground flight operators the crew on board the Odyssey would use their lunar module as a “lifeboat” before re-entering the command module to swing back to Earth via the moon’s gravity. On the last track, the psybreaks inflected “Finale”, the Apollo 13 performance dialogue resumes:

Johnson Space Center: “Coming up now on three minutes until time of drogue deployment. Standing-by for any reports of acquisition. (pause) We got a report that ARIA 4 aircraft has acquisition of signal.”

Houston: “Odyssey, Houston. Standing by. Over.”

Captain Swigert: “Okay, Joe.”

Houston: “Okay. We read you, Jack.”

Houston: “Odyssey, Houston. We show you on the mains. It really looks great!”

Johnson: [Applause] “Extremely loud applause here in Mission Control.”

It’s a rejoiceful return to Earth, to consciousness—splashed down, resurfaced, forever changed. The depths of space teem with mystery and possibility, the human exploration of its vastness analogous to the drift into the unconscious associated with dreaming, a universal source of visions brought back to benefit the world of traveler-visionaries. But “the catch” cannot be obtained without having first risking one’s life, confronting life-threatening uncertainties, the danger implicit to the Odyssean narrative and the perils risked by Argonauts transferred to the space odyssey. Francis Goodwin’s 1638 utopian lunar story Man in the Moone, or a Discourse of a Voyage Thither offered the tale of an astronaut named Domingo Gonsales who negotiated devils and wicked spirits en route to the Moon. In the Space Age, the “devils” or “ghosts” were in the machine, the risks technical. That the perilous circumstance of the Apollo 13 mission finds appeal among EDM practitioners is possibly because they too know the risks of technical hitches, the possibility of a ruptured journey ever present in machine malfunction, crashed hard-drives, mixing errors—the competency with sophisticated hardware manipulated towards the functional outcome lending favorable comparison with the aeronautical engineer in command of the mission.

It’s easy to see why the adventures of spaceflight, instilled with boys-own tales of adversity and invention, would become so popular among a male-dominated DJ culture. The Apollo 13 incident and recovery evokes the heroic adventure stories built into spaceflight narratives popularised, for instance, in Heinlein’s Rocket Ship Galileo (1947). Moreover, the narrative sequentialises Joseph Campbell’s monumythical “hero’s journey”, which was built largely from masculine narratives. In The Hero With a Thousand Faces (1949), Campbell articulated the panhuman mythical narrative: “A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man” (30). There are several stages to this common mythic structure where the hero is called upon a quest, encounters a strange world, faces trials and overcomes challenges, often with assistance, and is awarded a gift as a result of experience gained. The “boon” may be used upon return from the journey to improve conditions in the world. The basic narrative involves—in the fashion earlier recognised by Van Gennep in Rites de Passage—phases of departure (or separation), initiation, and return, a narrative later put into the service of the psychedelic heroics entheonaut Terence McKenna deemed necessary to the survival of our species. Here, the challenge of goal-oriented spaceflight (i.e. NASA’s lunar missions) offers raw material for the monumyth. Twenty years following the publication of Campbell’s book, a Space Age version of the myth was performed on an international stage. And in a further 20-25 years, it was resurrected by Goa trance artists.

The entire mythical structure had been envisioned in the early 1960s when, in a Special Message to the US Congress, on May 25th 1961, President John F. Kennedy stated: “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal before this decade is out of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth”. The message was sampled by Digital Sun on “Men on the Moon” (The Spiral Of Power, 1997), amplifying the inimitable desire of artists to adopt the goals and achievements of NASA’s lunar programme to narrativize the hero’s journey.

In the wake of the self-spirituality movement post-1960s, the digital electronic revolution post-1980s, space conquest is typically repurposed to the goal of visionary transportation. In psytrance, we find the visionary zeitgeist translated into sites of reception where dance-habitués are enabled to interpret their non-ordinary states via narrative devices conflating the vacuum of space with the unconscious. Inside the cosmic vibe of the over-night trance floor, participants are cast upon a sea of audio disturbances and entropic noise, confront anomalous chemical reactions and diabolical event horizons. If travel through such space, the “voyage thither”, presents an odyssean challenge, its overcoming potentiates a successful transit, where the re-aggregation (to the morning, the Earth) potentiates interstellar rebirth, celestial satori, the re-evaluation of the self. Here, the successful negotiation of adversity is the mark of achievement, as consciousness breaks through the radio silence. Thus while “Hyperion” by Silicon Sound (Synthetic Chronicles, 2008) possesses many unanswered radio requests from Houston, the ultimate return is reassuring: “Buzz, this is Houston. Radio check. All systems are go, over” (from Phaxe’s “Secret Effects”, French Plaisir, 2008). For re-evaluations to take effect, what goes up must come down. And so divinity commands, as it does on Astral Projection’s “One”, that “you will return safely to Earth”. And with more than just Moon rocks.

Tranquility Base

The 1969 Apollo 11 mission is the most visited resource in this story telling. As the lunar module descends towards the Moon, pilot Buzz Aldrin announces via AFGIN’s cosmic Goan “Apollo 11 (The Eagle Has Landed)” on Art From The Heart (2009): “we are now in the approach phase, everything looking good, altitude 4200 feet”. Before it dumps its arpeggiated payload, in the decent to the lunar surface “Destination Milky Way” by Opium of the Masses (The Lost Planet, 2007) also offers the guiding voice of Aldrin: “13 forward … Coming down nicely. 200 feet, four and a half down… five and a half down… 60 seconds….” Crossfading back to AFGIN’s "Apollo 11" now, only a matter of feet from the surface and evoking feet shuffling on an outdoor dance floor.: “three feet down, 2 ½, kicking up some dust, 3 feet two 2 1/2 down, faint shadow, four forward, drifting to the right a little. OK”. The interfacing of deep space and deep mind appears to motivate Tikal’s “Black Space” (Cosmic Dragon, 2008), the title track deploying some of most significant dialogue in the history of the Apollo programme. Neil Armstrong from the Moon’s Sea of Tranquility: “Houston, Tranquility Base here, the Eagle has landed.” A likely smirk in recognition, for example, of the implications of post-DMT inhalations, the response of Houston Flight Centre crew to the Apollo 11 astronauts (and the world): “Roger Tranquility, we copy you on the ground. You’ve got a bunch of guys about to turn blue. We’re breathing again.”

A host of artists have stepped into this momentous exhalation in space-time. Part of a masterful achievement in sonic psy-fi, Space Monkey’s “Game Over” (Psychotic Episode, 2004) approaches the cosmic threshold with a rousing horn section and a towering bass line. On the threshold of the doorway to the Moon:

Armstrong: “Everything is go here. We’re just waiting for the cabin pressure to bleed to a low enough pressure to open the hatch. It’s about .1 on our gauge now”

Houston: “We’re seeing relatively static pressure in your cabin. Do you think you can open the hatch at this pressure?

Armstrong: “We’re going to try it. The hatch is coming open.”

Over on the chill floor, ambient artist Alpha Wave Movement picks up the soundtrack on “No Mans Land” (A Distant Signal, 2002). “I’m gonna step off the LM [lunar module] now,” Armstrong announces ahead of Floyd-like synth melodies. And from “Mapping The Heavens” on that album, Armstrong recites his immortal line: “One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind”. Having crossed into the Sea of Tranquility an astral euphoria has been achieved from which a sense of universalism is obtained, perhaps best conveyed through the announcements of President Nixon in radio conversation with Armstrong and Aldrin at their off-world base, Tranquility. It is a popular speech, sampled by Astra Projection on their euphoric testament to the moment of singularity, “One” (Psy-Trance Euphoria 2, 2009). With omission of any reference to national identity, and with Nixon’s identity hidden to those unfamiliar (I assume the great majority of listeners), it comes over as the outcome of a kind of cosmic communitas, and an affirmation of self mainlined in communion with the Godhead: “This has to be the proudest day of our lives. And for people all over the world, I am sure they too join … For one priceless moment in the whole history of man, all the people on this Earth are truly one; one in their pride at what you have done”. The Moon landing was the context for an unparalleled televisualised peak experience, one in which differences of state were momentarily set aside, and where the project of the self became, to paraphrase Turner, coterminous with that of the human species. The narrative would be popular in trance. For instance, singing an ode to the Goa foundations on their epic “Summer 89” Israelis California Sunshine use “all of the people of this Earth are truly one”, from the hypnotic album Trance (1997) which also includes “The New King” where a boy repeats: “we came in peace for all mankind”.

This peon to communion in space had been early forecast by science fiction editor and founder of the American Interplanetary Society, David Lasser, in his book The Conquest of Space (1931) where rocket-propelled spaceflight would facilitate the transcendence of national jealousies, racial differences and class conflict, with rocket science, as De Witt Douglas Kilgore demonstrates in his fascinating study Astrofuturism: Science, Race and Visions of Utopia in Space (2003) functioning as a grand unifying project orchestrating the evolutionary leap into global peace. Human presence on the Moon had long been imagined as the marker of transition from inter-ethnic strife, a theme that can be read in the voice of Neil Armstrong who speaks from the Moon on Tikal’s “Overdrive” (Carnival, 2005): “It’s a great honor and privilege for us to be here representing not only the United States, but men of peace of all nations and with interest and a curiosity and with a vision for the future.” The lunar revelation was brought home by Goa trance collaboration Moog (Jean-Loup Kehrig, Nicolas Ledent and Thierry Gotti), who, in 1994, produced the track-length odyssey “Euromotors” in which Aldrin reports to Houston that the lunar-landing crown-chakra communion “inspires us to redouble our efforts to bring peace and tranquility to earth.”

Coming Down, to Earth

It could be argued that this lunar performance has been deployed by the transnationalists of psychedelic trance to convey their investment in a planetary vibe, one readily articulated, for instance, in Earth Dance, Portugal's Boom Festival or Total Solar Eclipse Festivals. But probably the most significant space-borne revelation sampled within psychedelic trance can be detected on Astral Projection’s second CD release, where the only words on the track “Black and White” are retrospective commentary from Apollo 8 mission Commander Frank Borman: “And the view of the Earth, it was the only place in the universe that had any color. Everything else was black and white” (Trust in Trance, 1996).

The comments speak to what has been identified as the greatest revelation of the Apollo missions—deriving not from rocks gathered on the Moon, but from Earth, the awesome spectacle of which over the lunar horizon startled Borman and his crew, the first humans to witness the Earth from the Moon’s orbit (literally from the “dark side” of the Moon). Indeed the “Earthrise” photograph taken by crewman William Anders would become the Rosetta Stone of the environmental movement. The image of our blue turning globe, small and vulnerable in the vastness of space was, according British space historian Robert Poole, “an epiphany in space… a rebuke to the vanity of humankind”.

In an essay he wrote in the early 1970s, “The Moon Walk – the Outward Journey”, declaring the lunar mission and its broadcasting as a moment which should unburden humanity from enthrallment to external divinity, Campbell himself stated: “Now there is a telling image: this earth, the one oasis in all space, an extraordinary kind of sacred grove…. the entire globe now a sanctuary, a set-apart Blessed Place. Moreover, we have all now seen for our-selves how very small is our heaven-born earth, and how perilous our position on the surface of its whirling, luminously beautiful orb”. As “an outward journey …. into our selves”, the trip to the Moon, he declared, “has transformed, deepened, and extended human consciousness to a degree and in a manner that amounts to the opening of a new spiritual era".

Offering what has been referred to as the “Overview Effect”, Earthrise and the later Whole Earth image taken on the Apollo 17 mission (1972), would confirm the idea of “Spaceship Earth” (a phrase coined by Buckminster Fuller), provide the stimulus for the “Gaia hypothesis” and inspire the popular expression of ecological and humanitarian concerns, illustrating for the first time that the Earth is an autonomous, self-regulating biosphere.

“Spaceship Earth” was memorialised by numerous artists from the Goa period. Sheyba’s “Into the Fourth Dimension”, first released on the EP by that name (1995), features an enthused astronaut: “When I was in space, the most profound experience was to see this little planet from that distance”. The following year, the space-struck Asia 2001 laid down the gnosis on “Râ” (Râ, 1996): “Gaia became visible through the new knowledge about the Earth gained from space. Gaia is the Earth seen as a single physiological system, an entity that is alive”. By using these samples, Goa producers were enabling dance floor habitués to approximate the revelatory satori, to make the “leap of the human spirit”, as Campbell had it, already made by NASA's space voyagers.

The theme persists. Over ten years later, Filteria attempted to reproduce that moment of speechless ascension on the space operatic “Earthrise” (on Daze Of Our Lives, 2009).

Apparently, the Overview Effect also impacted Frenchman Brice Fruyt (aka Merr0w) whose Goa-inspired concept album Born Underwater (2009) was produced to evoke the Overview Effect, his “Blue Planet” promoted as “a heartbreaking ambient ode to the beauty and fragility of our planet and its seas”. And, having initiated a launch into zero gravity, Aphid Moon’s ascending opus “Go For Orbit” drops the payload delivered by the last man to walk the moon, Apollo 17 Commander Eugene Cernan:

You really know where you at this point in time and space, and in reality and in existence, when you look out the window and you’re looking back at the most beautiful star in the heavens, the most beautiful because it’s the one we understand and know it as home, its humanity, its people, family, love and live. You can see from pole to pole, and across oceans and continents and you can watch it turn and there’s no strings holding it up. And its moving in a blankness that is almost beyond conception (from Al Reinert’s 1989 documentary For All Mankind).

It's not "Thus Sprake Zarathustra", but Ovnimoon’s “Sacred Earth” (Geometric Poetry, 2009) is one of many soundtracks to the frisson by which one is gripped in that first moment when Earth (the Mother) is sighted in naked space. Beyond conception.

The awesome spectacle of Earthrise is often recaptured in poster art and event décor. For instance, as advertised in the November 2000 edition of Mushroom Magazine, an event called Euphoria in Hamburg on 11-11-2000 featuring Star Sounds Orchestra and Haldolium, was promoted using the Earthrise image. Such imagery would become pervasive, indeed integrated in artistic conception and stage design as in the concerted efforts by the Orb in the early 1990s during their U.F.Orb tour. But the concerted space flight would be taken much further by the awe-struck violin-electronic virtuoso Kenji Williams in his ongoing multi-media performance Bella Gaia: An Experience. For participants, the performance is designed to reproduce the effect of a flight into space, delivering an experience that is said to “evolve our perspective of, and connection to, our home planet.” Inspired by astronauts for whom the Overview Earth had been a life-changing experience, and performed in planetariums, Bella Gaia involves NASA/MODIS satellite imagery, orbiting visualisations of Earth from space, along with earthbound imagery celebrating the diverse cultural heritage of Earth’s human inhabitants. In promotions for the performance, it is stated that the sight of Earth from space is characterised by:

a dramatic cognitive shift in which the significance of man-made boundaries is eclipsed by a deep awareness that life on Earth operates as a borderless, interconnected whole. The striking clarity of this realization often triggers a keen sense of stewardship that seeks community beyond the limits of nationality and religion. The strength of this conservation instinct tends to grow even after the return to Earth, driving those who share this experience to reach out, and become highly active participants in the preservation of our common heritage.

And, furthermore, Williams states, the performance is designed to stimulate a renewed purpose to "maintain, preserve, and protect the Earth, as if the Earth itself is a world heritage site" (see performance trailer).

The planetarium might be remote from the dance floor, and it might seem like a long way from the new spiritualist commitment to an evolving self inflected within cosmic trance where an assemblage of digital, cyber and chemical tools have been the prosthetics for the remastering of subjectivity. But the ultimate result of the self-transcendence is the emergence of a global perspective, and the descendants of cosmic trance and other musics are deploying their multi-media tool kits in the service of the planet.

Within the context of spaceflight and intergalactic travel, transcendence becomes especially interesting when contextualising the encounter with aliens, or indeed our alien self. Stay tuned for that story.

This piece has been produced as part of a larger project on the intersections of technology and religion in psytrance, to be published in my forthcoming book Global Tribe: Technology, Spirituality and Psytrance Culture.

Many thanks to Kathleen Williamson for allowing me to gaze aloft from the observation deck near Nimbin, Australia.

Technomad: Global Raving Countercultures

2009-11-19T06:42:00.006+01:00

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

Dancecult Journal Launched

2009-10-01T23:43:00.005+02:00

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).

Ozora: Field of Dreams

2009-09-04T02:42:00.065+02:00

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.

The Journeybook launches in SF on Aug 8 2009

2009-07-30T21:17:00.004+02:00

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 Too Far Away: Rainbow Serpent Fest 09

2009-02-09T03:29:00.053+01:00

Photo: Ronnie Simulacrum

You have to travel a long way up river to find him.

So far above the headwaters there’s barely a trickle. Under the withering south-eastern Australian sun in January, under the direct pressure of quality sound, in that primal real estate between the speaker stacks on Monday afternoon, on the Market Floor, Rainbow Serpent Festival. It doesn’t get much better than this. And somewhere, amid all that optimising, under all that tweaking of sophisticated hardware, in a vibrant undergrowth of bronzed bodies and baked wet ware, the Colonel is getting his freak on. This is not the bird-frying Colonel of take-out restaurant fame. He’s not your rank and file denizen of the trance floor. Somewhere in this theatre of the absurd, this paddock of pizzazz, this cavalcade of crank, the highest, rankest and most de-commissioned officer in the PLA (the Psychedelic League of Australasia), Colonel Kurtz, is at large.

It’s Australia Day weekend 2009, and I’m attending the nation’s psychedelic carnival: in all likelihood the funkiest dance festival on the planet. They’d made expeditions from across the country, and around the world, for the 12th annual Rainbow. I’d driven down from Brisbane, some 2,000 kilometres north. Via Coonabarabran near the Warrumbungle Ranges, through Dubbo and Deniliquin, I rode astride the long Barren Highway, over a landscape scorched by an unprecedented heatwave. Near Parkes I made passage through Bogan Gate and somewhere near West Wyalong drove into a freak storm, lifting as quickly as it set in.
The following day, Murray River ghost gums guided me home around Echuca way as my 75 series Land Cruiser crossed into Victoria, making for the town of Beaufort, west of Ballarat, the locale of the Mother of all Doofs.

Photo: Web Grrl: ozdoof.com

Arrived near midnight, two days before the event’s official kick-off. 500 people were already on site, so it took some effort the following morning to locate Krusty. An altered statesman and luminary of the scene, he’d found some shade and began making camp – good thing, as by 10:30 AM the heat was making my blood crawl. Beginning with a shrine Krusty set against a tree, over the next day or two, the camp became a loose network of vans and tarps, peopled by a largely Melbourne based techno-cognoscenti. Adjacent, a non-intrusive independent sound system spilled warm tunes and mashups over my daily iced fruit loops.

Over the next couple of days the festival expanded like an inflatable tropical aquarium. More than 11,000 people eventually poured on site, a flourish of vibrance, colour and sound replenishing a punished land. With five stages hosting sounds and performances from straight-up progressive psychedelic trance to dub reggae, along with a Lifestyle Village (large workshops zone), Transformational Area (natural therapy) and Kid’s Zone, Rainbow Serpent has gained respect in the global alternative dance calendar.

Mirror ball fetishes sway from the trees of countless campsites like devotions to the Age of Disco-very. Tribal ensigns, entheogenic art and black light beacons are raised on and above this temporary sonicity whose inhabitants are infected by a wicked and knowing laughter. All around the site, curious sculptures, funny lights and cool interactive installations have appeared, perhaps none more impressive than a pyramidal structure called the LightScraper (check the video here) built by ENESS in a paddock.

LightScraper by ENESS

While the festal ambiance is fed by popular cultural imports (a small tribe of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles among them), local origins and mythologies are respected too (the story of the Rainbow Serpent chief among them). With traditional owner Uncle Ted Lovett leading the opening ceremony with his customary Welcome to Country, there was no doubting where I was. And as indigenous music, art and culture (Dugong cooking workshops, performance) danced in strange synchronicity with non-indigenous Australiana, illuminated by the flames of Robin Mutoid's fire organ, we were living an animate mythology.

Photo: Ben Dixon

Photo: Dallas Casey

Last sighted in these parts a year ago, Kurtz was inside the animation. The man who was “banned” from ConFest, the alternative lifestyle festival started by Jim Cairns back in 1976, which, by the 1990s, evolved into Australia’s premiere alternative gathering.

I’d first attended ConFest for New Year’s 1993/94, becoming so captivated that I returned 13 times, leaving finally in 1999 having completed a PhD thesis in anthropology on ConFest (part conference and part festival) and its organizing body, the Down to Earth Co-operative Society (DTE). In those early years of my attendance the event alternated between bends on the Murray River near Moama (at New Years ) and Tocumwal (at Easter).

Mutoid Waste Co Beetle Mantice at ConFest’s Teknow Village doof, New Year 1996/97

This was pre-invasion, according to the stalwarts of authenticity defending their beachhead from raving interlopers and the possibility of the newspaper headline "Five young teenagers dead at 'Go to Heaven in 1997 Spiritual Festival'". The pre-emptive headline expressed the fears and the fantasies of Les Spencer who distributed a document around DTE in 1996 instructing Confesters on the neo-sonic demonics of techno music. It all started with the arch-nemesis of old farts, none other than DJ Krusty, who in Easter 1995 teamed up with the Ci-Cada sound system detonating Goa Trance down town ConFest to the chagrin of inhabitants unsettled by the Vooor Vooor Vooor Vooor propagating across the billabong and upending their asanas. The following year, Krusty attempted to shift the doof to the DTE Winter Solstice Gathering. But his efforts to obtain approval (and funding) were hampered by DTE, which, under the ministrations of defender of "the ConFest spirit" David Cruise, ruled that the event's postered image of psilocybin compromised ConFest's reputation as a "family" event.

The doof that never was

For those seeking a place for the doof outside the ConFest city-limits, the negation was disingenuous. The oldies appeared to be behaving more like over-sized children than wise elders. It was Krusty vs Crusty. And the cultural war would begin with earnest. By Easter 1997, the Doof at the Murray river site near Moama, a collaboration of Krusty's TeKnow village and the Metamorphic Ritual Theatre Company's Labyrinth, took place on the most elevated part of the site, where all were subjugated by the beats. When, with horn honking, director-turned-vigilante, Laurie Campbell, drove onto the dance floor intending to tow away the generator, the theatre was in full swing. But when someone reached in, snatched his car keys and chucked them into the Murray River, the doofers declared that they weren’t going quietly.

When, in the next act, Laurie returned holding a hatchet with which he intended to stab the beast (the generator) in the belly, he was gang-tackled, brought to ground, and dispossessed of his prop (by none other than Robin Mutoid - who then lobbed it in the river). But while Laurie was prevented from hacking into the 3-phase generator cable (and likely electrocuting himself), under Cruise control, with the support of Spencer and an anarcho-gerontocracy, DTE would oversee the axing of the doof menace, despite efforts by the likes of Joe Stojsic, another of my Rainbow campmates, to augment a compromise in a techno-acoustic "village" he called "Hybrid". With more than an echo of Nancy Reagan, as the signature file of one detractor had it: “Just Say No to Techno”. In this climate, voting blocks of those identified as ConFest Negator Tribalists (or CNTs) slashed funding to techno digital arts, psychedelic culture and forest activism. Amid the boundary maintenance was Kurtz, who once held a series of unobtrusive Psychedelic Spirituality workshops at ConFest, becoming the subsequent target of a bizarre hate campaign. Public enemy numero uno.

With his photo pinned at the entrance over successive ConFests, the gossip moved faster than a fire front on Back Saturday, and even more toxic. Amid dark fantasies of village water supplies spiked with acid, sexual abuse, and innocents abducted by techno-terrorists, a scapegoat for all the imagined dangers bedeviling their retirement village, Kurtz was bound, packed with the community’s nightmares, and driven off into the Never Never. A flaccid Cruise was seen parading at subsequent ConFests in a body painted flight suit under a banner which could have read "Mission Accomplished".

But what’s this? Surviving the Department of Justice (who had appointed an administrator to DTE in 2001), here they were, Cruisy and Les - out here in Never Never Land. The two most responsible for "saving ConFest" by carefully manufacturing, and leading crusades against, its enemies, stepping into the land of nod, nod, nod, nod. Over ten years later, I guess they came to see where everyone went. I meet Dave and Les in the workshop area late Sunday. The former sitting quietly nursing a video camera and carrying the kind of weariness I imagine one acquires scanning the horizon for spooks. Wearing earplugs, with no music amplified within the proverbial Coooeeeeeeee, Les delivers a 20 minute monologue on his recently completed PhD on what he calls the Laceweb. What are they seeing here, I wonder. And what are they hearing?

Col Kurtz and the Gesticulations

Photo: Sensesmaybenumbed

A Kingswood ute reverses slowly towards the Market floor. In its tray, couches hold raucous team-mates barracking for spirit. And their view? It's nothing short of sensational. Early afternoon and six thousand people are being dumped by long swells of funk. My woggle fully toggled, I bob across the sparkling sea on this longest of Mondays. That outfit from Cairns sharing their fleshy membrane with this crew from Doncaster East. Those bogans from Ballarat merging with these travelers from Israel, and those two recurring cute girls from Japan ... they are eternal. I make mid-floor interception with a cluster of marijuana plants offering the most organic decor in memory.

Familiar faces emerge from the deep. Rusty, I haven't seen for years, his scout uniform bristling with activist and esoteric insignia. Nano, a real life Drop Bear hunting action figure, lounges on his game, finding patterns in the chaos. A Norwegian goddess whose name I knew not but whose smile I knew well shouts stories of some other event on another continent. The illustrious gonzoloid Rak Razam, who with artivist-at-large, Tim Parish, had launched The Journeybook, a collection of entheogen-inspired narratives and imagery, on site. Holding an umbrella against the sun, under crown and in familiar tie-died uniform, the resplendent King Richard holds court in this federation of fedoras. And abandoning his command on the heights above the Market Floor, the Colonel himself now draws up among us, raising his side arms with uncanny precision, grinning under bass pressure, gesticulating in tongues.

And as I gaze to the right of stage ... there they are. A short squat figure and a taller man with grey beard. It's Cruisy and Leso, standing back beyond the stage, thin lipped at the spectacle. I imagine that they are staring directly at me. They are staring at me. At us! I wave, gesturing that they join me, join us, in this rare place under the sun.

Vooooooor Voooor Vooooooor Voooor.......

But like zoo patrons populating the safety margins beyond the primate enclosure, flâneur inspecting the contents of a terrarium, they are standing outside the vibe. They weren't intending to dive into these exotic waters off the Cape of Good Vibes. They were having none of it. Perhaps this is a case, as George Carlin once observed, that "those who dance are considered insane by those who cannot hear the music". Perhaps they're archonic inspectors searching for the WMDs they're certain are here. Sappers acquiring co-ordinates for a fire-strike? I don’t know, but the grooveless armada vanish into the haze as we warm to the synaesthetic currents in which we're immersed. And as I come about to an electronic funk quaking with tremors, turns and bombastic vocal samples, I know this isn't ConFest anymore. And, incidentally, it also isn't a European psytrance festival where intrepid adventurers are tasked to scale the summit of the progression. Under the relentless southern sun, amid techno-ferals and raving mates heir to a thousand backyard BBQs and a million corroborees, we are mounting a progression all of our own.

Photo: Ronnie Simulacrum

Photo: Beautiful Wwworld

Canadian puppet master Mathew Jonson is now conjuring a tech-tonic storm, the platform built throughout the morning by the likes of Reality Pixie, Sun Control Species, and Sensient, the salviated aural animatronics of the former (Darren Smith) benchmarked by his driving Schnickschnick which caused a sensation if for nothing more than the carefully crafted samples evoking psychedelic bogans of the third kind descending among, and getting up, us. Saddled up, and divining the spirit amid a groove intoxication that was growing phatter by the hour, the man of stainless steel, the Swedish Chef, held his Nangerator - the Whipped Meme Dispenser - aloft. Repurposed widely as a means of inhaling the compressed contents of nitrous oxide bulbs (or nangs), the gourmet whipped cream machine is a tool for assisting the gnosis, accessing the mysteries, downloading the shit.

Out here, the Nangerator is in high demand, for the mysteries are nigh and the Pope of Nitrous is calling in the reserves. On this Aussie Day weekend, in the strange wake of the NO2 assaying of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William James, and Ken Kesey, the dance floor might be a football field, the footie a nang drop-punted through the posts ... and the Rainbow dream team captain? Why, it's Kurtz.

The Kernel of Truth

To speak of progression is to speak of mystery - that which compels action, which motivates the sacrifice of energy in the pursuit of spirit. Gathering strength, we're at a significant site of the mysteries provoking and channeling spirit in all of its forms. And I say "we" since it is inside the optimised vibe where a multitude of individuals holding unique life stories, and pathways into this day, onto this space, may transcend their uniqueness by the most historically evolved means – that is, by dancing with others in a space-time which is remote, temporary and vertical. Such logistics enable a simultaneity of singularity and theatricality, evident in the rites of the Dionysian Mystery cults of Ancient Greece, and in the corroborees performed for scores of millennia in these lands by the Wathurwurrung and Djarwarrung. Since at least the 1960s and 1970s, alternative festivals have offered a means by which this logic (edge + brief + high = wow) has been adopted, resurrected, and, more recently, remixed.

Photo: Ronnie Simulacrum

And so you once had ConFest, an event whose cooperative framework, whose grassroots anarchist principles, enabled its social organicism and its "spirit". ConFest's spiritual ethos reveals a desire to remain free from possessive materialism, at the same time enabling experimentation with a multitude of alternative discourse and practice within its borders. This was a serious alternative cultural investment since 1976, and in the early to mid 1990s ConFest was a hot-house of ideas: permissive, exciting, diverse. But with nepotism, bigotry and CNTs characterising and populating Down to Earth, its event grew insular and, to the frustration of many, pointless.

Commentators have held that DTE's cooperative ethos made for a more open, virtuous and authentic event. But early in the new millennium, ConFest had transformed into a remarkably closed phenomenon, many of its innovators and activists ran out of town by possessive sheriffs. The Colonel was only one of these outlaws, although perhaps the most spectacular. With an early incarnation at the Tocumwal ConFest at Easter 1996 - where Krusty dubbed the doof village "Rainbow Dreaming" - The Rainbow Serpent Festival is a commercial enterprise. But it has evolved into an alternative carnival unparalleled in Australia, save perhaps for the Exodus festival. Its roots in electronic music, specifically psychedelic trance, colours its trajectory, as does its capacity to accommodate outlaws, the outraged, and the outrageous. Rainbow Serpent is much more than an electronic music festival. For one thing, music styles are diversifying. More widely, a commitment to support a local alternative arts scene, and host sustainable practices and indigenous culture within its precincts reveals a growing vision. More importantly, Rainbow Serpent, and a variety of smaller local event-crews, are vehicles for the evolution of a hybridized doof arts scene that, from its inception, has been sensitive to ecology and indigeneity, ceremony and celebration. And with support given for the augmentaton of its Opening and Closing Ceremonies, ConFest never had such an indigenous spirit.

Opening Ceremony Parade. Photo: Alicia Flanders

Closing Ceremony

The End of the Rainbow

Writing on West African possession cults, anthropologist Steven Friedson comments that in Africa "who you are often has as much to do with how you dance.” The statement offers some insight for Rainbows, but it may not be how you dance by comparison to others but that you dance with others. Here “possession” seems more intersubjective despite the fact that there are no universally identifiable deities or spirits of "possession". This is the terrain of the vibe, and it seems fair to say that, however you may struggle to describe it, the vibe cannot be experienced at home alone. At the thick end of the Rainbow, vibrating in its refracted hues, an optimised state of being together with others enables our encounter with the Other, including our other selves. These transpersonal states may provoke revelations about the universe and questions about our place in it, or they may confirm a spectrum of visions.

Yes, we were seeking answers and finding questions in this open classroom under the Southern Cross. And if there was a clear affirmation resonating as the orange disk slid beneath the western horizon, as traditional owners closed the festival under didj, drums and burning eucalyptus, in response to the Hendrixian question remixed in Sphongle's debut release Are You Shpongled?, it was as if we were declaring …. “yes, we are”.

And yes we are. The words I heard escape from the lips of the good Colonel as he was being shredded by electronic machetes.

"the colours . . . . . . . . . . . . . . the colours"

Tim and Rak strapped in on the launch pad of The Journeybook .... This is Houston, come in 13.....

Photo: Dallas Casey

Thanks to Sally, Paris and Jay and their Five Star couches, the photographers for their eye, Callum and Robin Mutoid for their valued feedback, Krusty for inspiration, Kurtz for his Being, and the many-coloured people of the Rainbow.

12 Noon, Black Rock City

2008-09-06T02:28:00.017+02:00

Disco Duck. Photo: Splat

It was a remarkable failure. My most impossible objective: to do the Man in a day.

Yes, that was the plan. Mounting pressures and misfortune back in the world (a new job approaching, a lost suitcase care of US Airlines and other miscellaneous matters), forced my decision to attend the week long Burning Man festival in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert for one day only.

Good thing, I thought, that my friend Seth was driving up on Wednesday night with the intention of departing by noon Friday (i.e. about 30 hours after our eventual arrival inside the festival at 4:30 AM Thursday). Seth would return to San Francisco to catch a flight to his mate's wedding. He was solid about this. I was resolute too…. but Black Rock City has ways of tampering with your default settings, disrupting connections with the outside world, exposing sound intentions to immolation.

So there we were, making the six hour drive to Nevada out of the Haight in a hired Honda Element Zipcar - me, Seth, and his Mozilla workpal Arun. These guys are smart, explorationists, driven, dedicated tech-visionaries, not uncommon credentials for citizens of Black Rock City. We each had a bike strapped on at the rear – for Black Rock City, which this year would be populated by an excess of 50,000 Burners, is a metropolis of treadlies, the principal means of transport throughout the city grid, down the promenades and across the open playa. Stopping for supplies in Reno - the Emerald City of Nevada, all grandeur and illusion - Seth and I stocked up for our day long ride through the city of marvels and its environs (Arun was staying for the duration).

We had a two hour wait in the queue upon arrival. It was nothing by comparison to the recent Boom festival in Portugal, which has become a monumental ordeal for participants some of whom endured a 30 hour wait and slow crawl to enter the world’s premier psytrance festival (more on that in a future report). Seth drove right into the left wing of the grid to our co-ordinates: the corner of G and 9:00. It was the Mootopia camp just opposite The Deep End, the popular dance camp completing their Burning Man adventure in 2008. Soon enough I vied for some sleep inside a dome belonging to the Root Society, out on the edge of the city on the corner of the Esplanade and 10:00. The dome featured a hive of comfortable Dr Seussian beds, no small hint of evolved Bohemia.

With a linked entrance, a larger 90 foot dome featured the biggest indoor dance floor on the playa with a whomping sound system, clustered climbing positions for random displays of fleshy gesticulations, and hoisted rings and harnesses for nocturnal acrobatics. The place was a circus, and you the performer.

I would find myself performing there later that night, but not before humping my pedals around the city, biting the dust on the soft, uneven desert surface, seeking shade under the Man, positioned on a tower dedicated to diversity, one of the hallmarks, we’re informed, of the American Dream, the theme of this year’s event. If there’s something that this event teaches us, it’s a tolerance for difference, a hospitality unparalleled, a meaningfulness in the desert of the surreal that manifests in the act, and indeed the art, of giving.

We seek sanctuary at Center Camp under the intense midday sun, hovering for a while at the epicentre of the Burner scene, a vast ritual-theatre with no script. There are several performance platforms around this vast arena, but the stage boundaries are fuzzy as I hitch a ride in the moving spectacle of fury crotchless riding chaps, painted nipples and pink parasols. Having rung the virgin bell at the gate entrance only a few hours before, Arun announces that he is overwhelmed by sensory data. It appears as if he’s had an empathogenic Piñata broken over him and has merged with its contents. On his maiden Burn, wearing a fur-lined Moo outfit, he is already part of the performance…. A stranger slips Baileys into my iced coffee…. It courses through my veins as we saddle up and head out.

The day is filled with encounters – with new and old friends at camp Low Expectations part of the Blue Light District occupying a choc right on The Wheel at C and 5:30-6:00.

Low Expectations

The camp could be called "The Comfortable Couch", or "Got Bacon", a lowkey affair whose hardcore geek mainstays have long assumed various volunteer roles at the event and in the Organisation. There's usually a few imbedded freakologists lurking around. I also meet Coach Ted, a man whose been Burning in absentia and finally made it home; the folks at Spock Mountain Laboratories with the scoop on “DJ Testitio”; Wonder Woman and other Mootopians; and ventured out into The Deep End...

As night falls over Black Rock City, it explodes with a collective charge unparalleled anywhere on the planet. The city ordinance to “leave no trace” and the commitment to develop responsible energy conservation strategies conflicting and other times complimenting the orgiastic desire to lay waste to one’s personal and collective resources. After all we were Burners, casted to perform in a ritual-theatre of sacrifice, sophisticated yet primal. And so, after dusk, with enough inspiration to overpower mortality, we plough through the dune-ripples racing ahead of the spice worms who would intoxicate us with sleep, or worse…. wakefulness. This was extreme partying, and we were the dosed-up denizens of deep playa.

Dismounting at the far terminus of the Esplanade at 2:00, I'd been riding the escalator all the way to the roof. But this was no smooth transit, with no predictable momentum, nor clear meaning. No certain arrival, and an even less certain departure. With its blinking mirages, fine dust white-outs, and blizzards of sensory impressions obfuscating clear directions, clarity and certitude are in short supply on the playa, a delirium that is translated into a style of music that plays havoc with predictability. Through broken polyrhythmic patterns, the festal distraction is embodied in the electro breakbeat, notorious for its derangement of repetition. Aural decay, a breakdown of structure, and an arse shifting funk.

A spectre appears out of the desert night ….. it’s me… With fellow night rider, Seth, who wears a plastic gold $ necklace, and Arun, aglow in Mootopian fur on an EL wired steed, we dismount in the open space of the Opulent Temple, an art and sound camp in its sixth year, built on the perennial shores of breakdown and release.

Opulent Temple. Photo: (evil) Stefan

It was around midmorning and Lee Coombs was coming on. Now here’s a guy who knows how to shift arse, and when it comes to finely sculpted and well-cropped playa-butt, this is not, by anyone's countenance, a standard operation. Coombs is a master of the build, accumulating all that tension, obtaining critical thresholds, until the electronic floodgates are finally opened and the playa-massive - the fleshive - is permitted to erupt with abandon. At the Opulent Temple, you know that moment has arrived as flames blast out from the DJ booth, a chamber that is part steampunk time machine and alchemist’s laboratory.

Mutate and Survive

Hours passed and it seems like I had danced across time and space … into the subjunctive realm. Near sunrise over the other side of the Man above 10:00, I stumbled into the dome of the Root Society. It was like morning assembly in the asylum, with duo 3l3tronic animating the disturbance. As the golden disc arose in the east, I made contact with the folks at the Green Gorilla Lounge, hunkering down over the raw funk cooking in their dome. It was here that I made interception with an object words can hardly translate.

It was the most audacious sound art vehicle on the playa. A mobile three level club in the shape of a yellow bath-time duck, the Disco Duck had unloaded its weird human cargo to greet the rising sun. With an auxiliary vehicle (a fur-lined double-decker bus) stocked with an arsenal of champagne, and with the morning sunlight refracting off its golden glitterball head, the duck was exposed in all of its splendour (check this flickr video illustrating how the giant duck with its green lasers for eyes and a fire-spitting mohawk, became integral to the nightworld at Burning Man).

Constructed upon an armoured amphibious assault vehicle, an instrument of warfare is reclaimed and transmuted into a pleasure machine. Although the amphibious vehicle lay hidden in its design, the vehicle is reminiscent of the reclamational work of legendary industrial-sculpture collective the Mutoid Waste Co, renowned for recruiting war machines for radical assaults on the senses. Throwing the first acid house warehouse raves in London at the old Coach Station and mutating the refuse of modern culture into the Marvelous, these salvage-situationists had been instrumental conspirators in London’s reclamational sensibility. Throughout the mid to late 1980s, and into the 1990s, the Mutoids had been busy revivifying obsolescence and transforming forgotten landscapes into objects and sites of beauty, stirring those who came to witness, and dance, with a passion to make some noise. In London and across Europe, furnishing squatted buildings with anthropomorphic engines, mutated bike parts, transmuted MIG fighter jets, and raising subterranean spaces of difference where all became a spectacle to each other, they incited fellowship and inspired the imagination.

MWCo Tankhenge framing Rieschstaag Berlin '92. Photo: Rene Menges

MWCo. Set for 'Blast Off 94', Tachelles Berlin. Photo: Rene Menges

In Australia, Robin Mutoid Cooke’s Mutonia Sculpture Park, which includes Planehenge among other pieces, constitutes an important development in this recycladelic diaspora. This is important to mention not least since last Winter Solstice, Mutonia, near Marree in outback South Australia, hosted the annual Mighty Burning Demon festival, a small gathering in which the burning of an anthropomorphic figure transpires. Sound familiar?

The MWCo were building “art cars” before the Man was first set aflame on Baker Beach in the mid 1980s. There are exceptional video compilations of early Mutoid work on Youtube. Note the “zombie beat” elicited by the Mutoid band presaging an electronic soundtrack at parties. And Robin Mutoid’s lens on the MWCo can be found in his chapter in FreeNRG.

With the prospect of nuclear armageddon shaping their artifice, the Mutoids developed a near obsession with a post-apocalyptic Mad Max aesthetic. “Mutate and Survive”—a rephrasing of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament slogan “Protest and Survive”—became the Mutoid mantra conveying dissatisfaction with conventional forms of protest which they thought ineffectual, and which would emblematize their own brand of resistance to the nuclear age.

All of this is not remote from Burning Man. For one thing, The Death Guild, with their Thunderdome arena and fleet of vehicles at least in part inspired by the Road Warrior, have long been integral to the event. The Death Guild illustrate that, out here, almost anyone can be a post-apocalyptic cult hero. For another thing, MWCo artists landed at Burning Man in force this year with their head-turning motorised animatronic fire-breathing horse and covered wagon Spaghetti West 10, and a pair of dinosaur-like mechanical beasts: the Dino-Dumper and the Clamp-O-Saurus.

Mutoid Waste Co's Spaghetti West 10. Photo: Colombian

But I digress. It was now Friday, approaching noon. Apart from a couple dozey hours on a mattress in the shade at the Deep End, I’d hardly slept. At this point the reasoning behind my departure was occulted by a looming white-out, my plans drifting rapidly out of view. Twenty-four hours in the desert and I was like Sergeant Howie, the archetype of order and organisation whose convictions made him the prime candidate for incineration in The Wickerman.

I rode downtown to camp Low Expectations to say goodbye to my friends. I arrive there and within minutes I’m drawing from a bottle of Tabu Dry. It was my friend Michael's parting gesture. Soon I’d be on the road back to California.

Just then, Jessica says, “why don’t you stay.”

"I can't."

“Why not?”

I was stumped. I couldn’t rightly recall. But then I remembered something. I didn’t have water, much food, nor a tent, blanket, supplies for another 4 days in the desert. I’d prepared for one day, as I needed to get back to the city …. for something.

“But we have more than enough water, food. Even a tent and a blanket....”

I was reclining on a tres comfortable couch in the middle of the desert glissading on absinthe, surrounded by 50,000 fellow pilgrims within a two mile radius. With each word she spoke I had fewer reasons to leave, until I was finally check-mated: “we can give you a ride back on the bus”.

What had I been thinking? Hadn’t I realised I’d get caught in this momentum, this open-ended potlatch of epic proportions, this vast canvas the significance of which lies in the relationships one forms through shared consumption in extreme conditions? Out here, in one of the most physically inhospitable landscapes in the country, transformed over a week into one of the more socially receptive environments a human can know, I was like the guy who once turned up at the entrance naked as an experiment to learn if and how he could survive. My failure to leave and his successful survival are strangely connected, if by nothing other than the compelling gift.

I would soon cycle back across the city to break the news to Seth - himself on schedule to bail at noon. "Congratulations", he smiles, handing me his remaining supplies, "you failed".

Thanks to crew at Low Expectations who made this short story odyssean. Nods to Seth and Arun and others at Mootopia. And further gratitude to Coach Ted, Lee Coombs the super-cockers and all those other-selves who Burn.

Rhythm Nation: Jamaica

2008-08-04T06:31:00.017+02:00

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 Wa r, Dallas and Erin in Venice Beach, and Jay Walsh who maintains San Francisco’s best couch.

Rasta roadhouse, near Bath

Serpentine ODDySEA: From Keilor East to the Goomburra Valley

2008-03-06T04:53:00.059+01:00

Image by Shiptu Shaboo

I arrive at an oasis at a bend in the creek. The gully rises to a stand of eucalypts on the far bank as a perfect glade rolls out under my feet. It’s an isolated camp ground, and in most circumstances more than suitable. But this is no ordinary circumstance.

I need elevation. Stumbling forward, I climb out of the gully and pick out a crest at the base of a ridgeline leading further up the mountain. Here, a wide branched acacia sheds long black seed-pods on a green ledge overlooking the Goomburra Valley. After the recent rains, it’s a luscious promontory about two clicks from the dance floor, the bass emanating from somewhere below, an overture to a darkening mood.

As I scuttle to the deck, incensed crows open up with a fusillade of invective. Blue patches flash through an oppressive grey, winds accelerate and recede, mirroring my internal undulations. Dried leaves on a fallen branch chatter like bearers of uncertain tidings. Sounds from a system rise through the trees, sunlight and breeze remastering melodies en route to my ears on this solitary mount under a non-ordinary tree. Its swollen trunk possessing unusual waistline markings, the acacia’s generous boughs offer its leaves all the sunlight they need on this day.

But on this day, the clouds do not hang idle. Forming a restless roof, they offer protection from sun exposure and dehydration. Yet blustery winds show me no quarter, scattering thoughts and voiding my stomach in accompaniment to the wind-warped bass. Carrot and chickpeas splutter forth in cannonades of bitter fluid. Coughing up my spleen so close to the sky, I give chunderous applause to the performances in the valley below, even while I remain, myself, a pathetic spectacle to the birds.

It’s mid February and I’ve ranged a long way up stream. This is Main Range National Park in Southern Queensland toward the end of a long wet subtropical summer. I am at the far boundary of Earthfreq, an electronic music festival in its third year operated by the elf-like Paul Abad, DJ/producer and founder of Subterran. How I arrived in this valley, in this condition, requires some backswinging.

Photo: Chris Jenkins

Several days before I was in Collingwood, Melbourne. Keele St to be precise, staying with my old friend Callum. A crossbreeding of SPECTRE’s Blofeld (minus the eyepatch) with Larry David, Callum is a PhD student at the University of Melbourne researching working class masculine narratives in film and literature. A local authority on “bogans”, “wogans” and “vogans”. But was he down with the entheogan? It was a haven in the tempest, the repartee welcome respite from the rigours of life at sea. But a storm front had been building. For two weeks I would throw lines at the bollards on Keele, sleeping no more than 4-5 hours a night in a front bedroom belonging to an absent housemate. In that time I imagined the room a cabin balanced on an unstable pier, lashed by howling winds and threatened by breakers. I also imagined one of the tenants, Kevin, a stealthy Korean IT worker who rarely left his room, performing a perverse sorcery deep into the night. I would become engulfed by a high-pressure system, mounting the ramparts, sweeping me off deck, setting me adrift.

From the Keele St pier, I cut the narrows of Smith St daily. With treacherous reefs and a weird rip, a confusion of TAB-centred desperation and Apology Week sentimentality, Smith St offered uncertain waters for the en-spirited voyager. A week passes into the next. Sometimes running errands, more frequently knowing no purpose, I cross into a subterranean delirium inhabited by dark archetypes, the dispossessed, and the disappeared. Its an inner city underworld populated by the shades of our selves, and other entities besides.

Gliding among shadows, one day I face off with a restless aya outside the Black Cat Café on Brunswick St, Fitzroy. Bearing rotten teeth and black eyes, a blemished-faced male about mid-twenties sat opposite cursing at some interference on an old Windows laptop. Unidentified hand gestures are performed in the space before him, and at me. Carving patterns in the air, it’s as though, a demiurge, he moves to conduct an unseen legion of shades through the device. Vulnerable, I feel host to an unusual presence. Would I disappear into the vortex opening before me? I bail before learning the answer.

The next day I enter Safeway at Smith and Hodgson. Several months before, at dusk in Friedrichstadt, Berlin, I descended the dark, cold and lonely grid of the “Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe”. Down there, after dark, camera-flashes illuminate specters inhabiting this field of concrete stelae testifying to a monstrous humanity. Specters or not, the truly frightful significance of this five acre work is that the boundary between the monument and the city around it is imperceptible. As paths descend in an undulating grid, stones on the sidewalk become low benches, then deeper slabs, and finally, the further one descends into the chilling complex, towering tombs, smooth and anonymous, leaning this way and that. Revealing how dehumanisation and horror are normalised via faint increments, pedestrians traverse the monument only seconds away.

But now, I was caught in the unforgiving glare of a modern supermarket, savings-seekers fated to stalk the aisles for the terms of their natural lives, and be doomed by their choices for eternity. This was but a minor excursion across the insidious architectonic of supermarkets. But hunkering down over an acre of cheese, stalking a gallery of slaughtered animals, withering in a clinic of commodity fetishism, I wondered if I had merely turned a corner in the concrete grid near the Brandenburg Gate. Rounding the aisle, shadow bands disfigure shelves pitching forward in a terrifying blur. I clutch my trolley against the compression. Feeling numb now, I descend the aisle and stand at the edge of the abyss. The horror! … The horror!

The charts had blown overboard. The captain’s logbook had vanished. And the needles in the systems gauges whirred. I had become a misshapen brigantine, a ship of the dark line. A phantom vessel named Lunacy ploughing the shopping lanes off Smith, disturbing the warning bells in the 12 Items or Less sluiceway. Jostling my trolley out into the lane, I arrive at a confluence. From here, I could become exiled to the high streets, plunder the trade routes of the inner city, sail into uncharted silence.

What spirit was abroad? What had gotten into my hold? An adequate answer may not ultimately arrive, but I will trace my wake back to late January, to the Rainbow Serpent Festival, the psychedelic trance and alternative lifestyle carnival in its 11th year near Beaufort outside Melbourne.

I caught a ride in back of a white Defender with John-Paris and his tall outrider Jules, neither of whom short of a smile and good humour, Paris a bloke George Johnston would have known as an “eternal barman”, Jules drawing back on a well crafted tube of Heavenly Music.

It's the tail end of January, and after two years on distant shores I returned to Australia, unloading from a Qantas airbus into the Rainbow Serpent festival. Head swimming in multiple time zones, I would enjoy the company of compatriots old and new, among them Alan “bags” Bamford, turning 50 on the dance floor, and travelling like someone half that age. Old ravers never die, they just ... never die.

A seasonal congress of all those knowing nods, smiles and infectious gestures, Rainbow is that rare symphony which makes an impression without too much pretension. Evoking an aesthetic combining larrikin with feralia, its population removed from the contessas of clubland or the alpha male posturing of the European trance circuit (e.g. German "Goa"). An avuncular topography, familiar but rarely short of surprises. While I’d travelled and lived in over a dozen countries in the previous two years, and while, as a Scout - and, what’s more, a patrol leader in the First Highton Rosellas - I’d learned to “Be Prepared”, I was ill-equipped for the foreign terrain I would soon enter.

Demolishing a single cone ice cream in front of a Mr Whippy van in the festival market, Martin was an unlikely shaman. Just down from us on this Sunday, 3,000 people were emptying their remnant sprite on the dance floor of the Market Stage, where my mate Shane was cutting shapes in the turf, a ribbon of his great grandfather’s service medals pinned to his jacket. It was Australia Day weekend, and, surrendering to the rhythms performed by local legend Andrew Till, a legion of trance troopers, these baked and bronzed diggers of dance, were earning their decorations.

Photo: Ronnie Simulacrum

A Song - Tim Parish

Around dusk the evening before, thousands gathered to witness an Opening Ceremony unparalleled in the history of Australian outdoor dance events. It was an elaborate Welcome to Country evolving considerably from former events to become a popular interactive spectacular. With a sand mandala on the dance floor (a serpent encircled earth depicting the Australian landmass), Uncle Ted’s welcome to country, a smoke cleansing ceremony, ochre-caked Koorie women and men performing dance, and a parade of honour, the event featured the kind of spiritually charged and cheese-injected flamboyance that Australians manage so well. At one point the crowd was singing the “I am/We are Australian” song at the behest of one of the older aunties present. Even the Japanese onlookers were lip-synching the Telstra anthem. Later, the MC’s had us all touching earth and sky and blessing the dance ground for a serious stomp.

Photo: Tom Andrews

Photo: Ronnie Simulacrum

A variety of the scenes endogenous to Rainbow, along with various luminaries, were applauded as they paraded the outer circumference of the sand mandala. In costume, waving flags, raising cheers, they were introduced by the MCs. The parade of honour featured pagans, eco-warriors, peace activists, stilt walkers, fluffy ravers, and a woman in blue knee-length satin, her dress patchworked with countless Union Jacks and Southern Crosses, an ostentatious Aussie flaggette. This flourish struck me. It was an enfreaked version of the Olympic Games Opening Ceremony in Sydney 2000, which itself featured a smoking ceremony, Central Desert women performing a segment of the Seven Sisters dance, and, of course, a pageant parade. Like that event, the current proceedings were crowded with variety show entertainment. Hey Hey It’s Rainbow. But lets not forget that this intercultural ceremony evolved from the same commitment to legitimacy and belonging that filtered into the Olympics ceremonies, a desire building through decades of resistance and now apparently blooming at a time when even the most power-charged building on the continent – Parliament House – gets a smoking (on 13th February 2008 when in-coming Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, delivered the long-awaited apology to members and descendents of the Stolen Generations). But we were a long way from Stadium Australia, and Canberra. The guy in front of me was more likely on mushies than Fosters.

It’s a curious juncture, that place where the carnival (the place and time where truths are ruptured, authorities are lampooned and hierarchies inverted) and the ceremony (where religious and cultural authorities are propitiated and reaffirmed) collide. Where excess and abandonment rub up against ethos and law. Where parody penetrates pride. The RSF Opening Ceremony was that confluence, its atmosphere drawing from a mixture of laughter rippling across the crowd, and solemnity, a dutiful commitment to perform what is right. This mixture of joy and duty was also apparent at the Green Energy Stage operated by the Red Bus crew which was powered by 100% renewable energy (solar panels, wind turbines and bio-diesel) and evoked a desire for sustainable living practices as illustrated by carbon credit initiatives, composting toilets, recycling bins and the commitment to composting around site and in the market (where stall holders were obliged to use biodegradable plates, cups, bowls and cutlery). And somewhere in the conflation there’s theatre, like the Nomadic Nymphs who wandered the festival "in search of their lost love and life source", water. Pleasure cross-fading with drama, for its scale (maybe 7,500 people in 2008), Rainbow Serpent is at the leading global edge of alternative dance festivals.

Photo: sensesmaybenumbed

Photo: Chris Jenkins

But down in the market, I’m preoccupied with other matters. For one thing, I’d been invited to my old friend Phil’s place in Keilor East where Martin was holding a small ayahuasca circle.

Two days after the festival I find Martin grinning mischievously over the stove in Phil’s kitchen under a flight path of Tullamarine airport. Pieces of a fat Banisteriopsis caapi vine containing harmala alkaloids are bubbling away in a pot. Experienced with entheogens, Phil knows a smile himself. Decorated with statues, hand paintings, and wood carvings of varying spiritual traditions, the house is a suburban temple. The mood is calm, and there is no agenda, though it’s conveyed that going in with a personal intention is normal practice. I bring to mind the endeavour to “stay the course”, to remain committed to the role of storytelling, to document the lives and works of others, to contribute to the collective canvas, or some such. We had boarded, were taxiing for departure, the climb angle and destination unknown. Cushions, blankets, jugs of water, candles, and buckets … deep buckets … lined the apron.

Having fasted for a day, that night in Keilor East I drain off a cup of freshly prepared syrup. It’s nauseatingly bitter. Now night, the door to the backyard open, I lay back into the cushions and close my eyes. Over the next hour or so, foregrounding the ambient notes of Don Peyote, Ishq, and Pete Namlock, in the periphery of my vision there appear bust-like forms, some strangely familiar, glissading to meet my gaze, then vanishing as my mind pursues them. About an hour later, critical to the ritual, the potion is chased down with 200 mgs of DMT prepared from Australian wattle (Acacia). Sometime afterwards, I sense liquids snaking about my stomach and intestines, scanning my internal architecture. A sinuous sentience coursing through my body, hairline cracks forming on the lining of my guts. I form a sensation that wisdom, a perennial gnosis, is present, yet remains occulted, locked in an impenetrable black box. What was this device, and, more to the point, what lay inside? Could it be cranked like a phonograph? Would my ears interpret its frequencies? I seem to have become a caricature grinding this esoteric hardware. Sometime later, staggering with uncanny precision, I find the toilet. Rushing to unbuckle my belt, my backside smacks the seat and I perform a powerful liquid evacuation.

The others present vomit throughout the night, some spectacularly, poking fingers back to force the purge, up-ending to the accompaniment of Adham Shaikh. It was a savage soundbath. And amid the chorus, I detect Martin whispering to someone/something. The flight controller perhaps? While not joining the spontaneous acoustic bucket band, I’d overseen the spirit’s discharge astern. An end to the occupation. Anchorage in a calm harbour. Touch down. Or so I imagined. But I was unaware that the incursion was far from over. To remain at sea for weeks to come.

That morning, I departed the western suburbs for Collingwood, drifting, as it transpired, into a hypnagogic fugue. Afflicted by abdominal pressure, broadsided by dark influences, nauseated in the inner suburbs, I was swept into a lunar maelstrom, directed by a power stranger than fiction. In Collingwood, I developed an acute awareness of a hinge complaining ceaselessly on the door to the otherworld. At once, a dark recess formerly unobserved, and an arc from a lantern swinging there. A warning? A beckoning? I couldn’t be certain. But if ayahuasca holds a torch to the shadows, dispatches rangers into forgotten places, rendering inviolability history, its tendrils also reach out to compatriots in and of the Other, compelling one to seek both the Other and “the others", or indeed the Othering others.

And so, I waxed for an afternoon with Eamon “Jungle” Wyss, in the backyard atrium on Keele, under a lemon tree. Foregrounding a slanted sky, he sat on a bench transferring data. Jungle co-founded Melbourne’s Psycorroboree, whose sonic outlands, the Gaian Thump festivals, evolved into the Mythopoeia Gathering held at Opoeia, an Eco-Arts Retreat operating in the Angahook State Forest until 2007. These were formative gatherings in Melbourne underculture and its many afterparties. An unassuming and expansive weaver of threads, Jungle is also an unofficial doorman. Caretaker of the threshold. A midwife to the event horizon. After all, Opoiea means “to make open”.

The sun pierced the waters, washing me in a new light. Under these refractions, one afternoon in the narrows of Smith, my prow broke the surface and made toward anchorage. Churning in the shallows on an uneven keel, that day, during a partial solar eclipse, I made interception with the Kent St pub, a perfect bucket shop for a disembodied seaman. Seated el fresco with Undergrowth’s Tim Parish, Sarah McDonald, and Order of ChAOS magickian Orryelle Defenestrate-Bascule, we poured over Orryelle’s “esoterotic” sketches, a magickal union of opposites sprouting from a sketch-pad, and to be reproduced in hir new "Graphic Grimmoire" Conjunctio. I’d met Orryelle back in the mid-1990s at ConFest, back when s/he and, Metamorphic Ritual Theatre Co and The Mutation Parlour had mounted the unforgettable interactive ritual The Labyrinth. Drawing on Greek and other mythologies, the ritual theatre had Theseus slaying the Minotaur, the beast within. It struck me that the re-convergence with this trickster of myth, language, gender and transformation, this tireless chthonic syncretist, was, at this time, no small coincidence.

And so it was like this, bobbing on the surface, plummeting to unusual depths and rocketing through the clouds, waning and waxing in an occult odyssey, that I spent two weeks in Collingwood.

My weary rig approached a critical horizon twelve moons from drinking the “vine of the souls”. I’d spent several hours that day in the Edinburgh Gardens off the shores of tranquility, but the winds were again picking up, the seas had grown menacing, and shadow bands raced towards the horizon. Earlier that night, in despair, I phoned friends seeking solutions to worsening spells of nausea, and imagined organ failure. I was vacillating. The pier had collapsed. Memories drowned in rapid review as I plunged into darkness. Dragged by turbulence along the seabed, disturbed sediment rose in clouds. The waters turned overcast, and ... I needed to vomit. I opened my eyes, lifted my head above the surface and sucked in a deep breath. I began heaving, violently. Dry-reaching, for the first time since that night under the flight path.

And thus, it commenced. That night, ascending, I floated subsurface, riding warm numinous currents, passing into unmeasured ecstasy. Beaching at high tide, I was saturated by wave upon wave of hallucinations. The convulsions triggered a euphoric surge through my systems equipment, precipitating a long rapturous duration. The floodgates opened, the flight data had been accessed, and although I’d not a processor capable of handling this raw information deluge, these were the most overwhelming readouts on record. Surfacing repeatedly, I found myself blowing like a whale. I came about, and the experience was unparalleled.

The Night Doctors - Tim Parish

Though many have it that a saturation point may be achieved around 6 hours from consumption, two weeks from ground zero I seemed to have acquired what some call the “ayahuasca afterglow”. But in the calm waters of the following day, questions mounted. Principally this: had I located my Kurtz, and taken him out, before becoming him? Had I defeated the Minotaur? Willard had hacked down the Colonel with a machete. Theseus finished the beast with Ariadne’s sword and returned using a ball of thread. I hadn’t even a Leatherman Micra. A miraculous reversal had occurred, a tidal transit. Yet, like buckled flotsam, I lay ashore, foundering, without definition or clarity.

Loading my pack, I knew that I should leave these metropolitan shores and journey up river. To the headwaters, if necessary.

Photo: Ronnie Simulacrum

It was necessary. And so, two days later, having arranged a cheap flight to Dr Dave’s place, I washed ashore at Sunrise Beach near Noosa Heads on Queensland's Sunshine Coast. In the land of the gated golfing estate and doggie hydro-bathing services, heavy-bassed havens of dissent shelter by storm-wracked beaches. But, I was compelled to see a mountain range rise between myself and Golf Country. And so, nauseated in the tropics, I applied the wax and goofyfooted the estuary to Earthfreq, a “tribal” outpost 300 kilometers south up the Goomburra Valley.

Photo: Ronnie Simulacrum

It was a four hour drive from the coast. I arrived late Saturday, and crashed.

With Sun Control Species, Antix, Spoonbill and Abad himself on the Sunday bill, the day held much promise... But there’s nothing like well-made plans gone south. And magnetic south they went. Around midmorning, I wandered to the floor greeting a few old friends en route, among them wise and delightful zine queen and Earthdream veteran Kathleen Williamson. On the dancefloor brothers Tetrameth and Shadow FX were collaborating in the mix, with doofers performing vertical re-entries on the lip of a fierce rhythm. But I was floored by the vocal sample amplified at the moment I entered the dancescape. It was from, as I later discerned, Tron's bowl-quaking "Amasonic" : "ayaaaa... huasca...... this is the other psychoactive beverage," which in that moment evoked an extreme state of duende consequent to consumption. It wasn’t so unusual. After all, an entheogenic sensibility has proliferated within this scene, an encounter with otherness promoted from its foundations through sonic, visual, and textual media. But, it struck me as ominous, a perceptual cue hailing me like a harbour beacon rocking in a gale, a signal becoming visceral as my guts churned, ears thumped, and the music grew inaudible. I was stranded beachside on a sea of nausea. And it was king tide.

Agoraphobic mid-dance floor. Perhaps I shouldn’t have had those space laced fruit loops for breakfast. Nor the Boags I cracked afterwards. It was as if the sentient Bar Keep had looked the intruders square in the eyes and, pointing to the exit, demanded “YOU… OUT”. And so, marooned, still, I was compelled to show the nuisance the door. Wasn’t going quietly. But this was Bar Keep’s orders.

I had to evacuate myself from the area, before total immobilization. Fleeing up the valley, I traced the winding creek bed away from the party.

And so it was, meandering, in search of elevation, that I found the promontory and its acacia, under which I’d collapsed. The handle had been wound to its limit. Jeers erupted from the bush balconies. And my terrible cache would finally exhaust. If La Purge was a one-man circus staged above the headwaters, this may have been its dismal finale. A murder of critics hectoring the clown to the death, as rain squalls over a distant range…. And what was that slithering away into the undergrowth?

Sun Control Species was playing now, I imagined, drifting. Hours pass, and at some point the tide must have turned. The pall had lifted, the winds softened and a new light angled through the branches. The show over, the crows had grown satisfied, and the acacia bore a curious elegance. This was no ordinary tree, and I felt sheepish in its presence. I held it for a duration and stepped gingerly about my ridgeline station absorbing surrounding views through the eyes of a neophyte. It was as if I'd dwelt there for years, committing minute details to memory.

As distant kookaburras break their silence I descend from my mount through the long incline of sclerophyll. Upon the final approach to the gully at the familiar bend in the creek, I lurch sideways to avoid a large spider’s web. But then, a commotion freezes me in my tracks. I turn to look. A eucalypt is set in the gully wall. Like an angled chimney, its thick roots are visible as the wall drops to a serene rock pool and a green glade beyond. On the tree’s trunk in full repose and with neck and chest flared, there emerges the finest goanna I've ever set eyes on. Having jumped from its blocks further up the tree, its bulk now progressed in slow motion with the thinnest of heads falling slowly in my direction. It is an enormous Lace Monitor, maybe 1.3m in length. The guardian of the gully. A keeper to the mysteries. The sitter. And it is as if he is stating: “Go now … but remember, you are not alone”.

Painting: Natalie Bateman

“I understand”, I whisper, stepping across the creek to the glade beyond. I move to the bank opposite the serpent, his elevated eyes tracking every step. Forming an S on the trunk above, he gradually re-assimilates into the tree. Crouching, I dip a head cloth in the pool and wash my face. Glancing about the glade, I feel like I’ve been leveled by a cosmic steamroller.

It was three weeks since the intervention in Keilor East. I’d skippered my rig round the Horn in violent seas, emerging, finally, under watchful eyes. Out there, at the furthest edge of the dance floor, I’d given my black box a crank. Kurtz had received a decent hiding, though I knew implicitly that he lurks, still, in the hinterlands.

And so, as the sun meets the horizon, awakening from this trance, I wander back to face the music…

Photo: Jamard

Thanks to Tim Parish, Shiptu Shaboo and Natalie Bateman for their art reproduced here; to Ronnie Simulacrum, Chris Jenkins, Andrew Ford, Tom Andrews, Sensesmaybenumbed and Jamard for their great photos. And big thanks also to Callum Scott for sound advice on the narrative.

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

2007-10-15T14:50:00.000+02:00

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

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Ozora: Field of Dreams

The Journeybook launches in SF on Aug 8 2009

Monday Too Far Away: Rainbow Serpent Fest 09

12 Noon, Black Rock City

Rhythm Nation: Jamaica

Serpentine ODDySEA: From Keilor East to the Goomburra Valley

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

Friday, JULY 30th 9:00pm – 10:00pm
1015 Folsom, 1015 Folsom Avenue San Francisco, CA