Doctor of Philosophy

Home , Blake Baxter, Bounce Festival, DJ Rolando, DVS1, Electronic Music Midwest, Eugene Thacker

RICE UNIVERSITY

tommy symmes

A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE

APPROVED, THESIS COMMITTEE

William B Parsons William B Parsons (Apr 21, 2021 11:48 PDT) William Parsons

Jeffrey Kripal Jeffrey Kripal (Apr 21, 2021 13:45 CDT)

Jeffrey Kripal

James Faubion James Faubion (Apr 21, 2021 14:17 CDT) James Faubion

HOUSTON, TEXAS April 2021 1

Abstract

This dissertation studies dance music events in a field survey of writings, in field work with interviews, and in conversations between material of interest sourced from the writing and interviews. Conversations are arranged around six reading themes: events, ineffability, dancing, the materiality of sound, critique, and darkness. The field survey searches for these themes in histories, sociotheoretical studies, memoirs, musical nonfiction, and zines. The field work searches for these themes at six dance music event series in the Twin Cities: Warehouse 1, Freak Of The Week, House Proud, Techno Tuesday, Communion, and the Headspace Collective. The dissertation learns that conversations that take place at dance music events often reflect and engage with multiple of the same themes as conversations that take place in writings about dance music events. So this dissertation suggests that writings about dance music events would always do well to listen closely to what people at dance music events are already chatting about, because conversations about dance music events are also, often enough, conversations about things besides dance music events as well.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to my dissertation committee for reading this dissertation and patiently indulging me in conversations about dance music events. Thanks to the Twin Cities promoters and writers who contribute interviews. You make this dissertation a material thing. Thanks to all the people I’ve lived with during this project; you put with a lot of yammering. Thanks to all the people I’ve boogied with in the last six years; you put up with a lot of energy. Thanks to Craig and all the kitties who continue to play with me; thank you Sammy for making me so many yummy noodles; and thanks to my parents for being the people who actually created this dissertation.

in memory of Clancy

Table of Contents

0: Introductions (page 4)

Movement 1: Field Survey (46)

Movement 2: Field Work (140)

Movement 3: Conversations (203)

4: Conclusions (237)

References (243)

Appendix: Interview Release Form (247)

0: Introductions

Post-rave promoters have successfully endorsed raving as a possibility engine for the self; a nocturnal utopia upon which rave-tourists disembark from their everyday lives; an antinomian otherworld within which event-inhabitants are licensed to perform their other selves; a sacred topos where dance-initiates and habitues (re)connect with co-liminars, nature and the cosmos. St. John 2004, 4

In the modern world, musicians disjoin music from norms, even as they necessarily adopt them. They create exceptional accomplishments, work outside of centralized paths, and piece together their own discontent and thought in sound. On an intellectual level, their music suggests that the abstraction of sound in its ineffable emptiness, in its fragility and ephemerality, might allow us to imagine a different world, to negate the world with discontent, and to model the ephemerality of lived time or of an ethical rhythm of life. Gallope 2017, 256

0.1: Preface

In August of 2015 I enroll at Rice University as a graduate student in religious studies with ambitions to generate a piece of writing about the question of the relationships between raves and religions. That December I attend a rave for the first time. The word to describe this order of events is not unorthodox. It is unprepared. I have a classic rave experience at that event. I dance from midnight until the music stops at six in the morning. Something has always felt different since that night. Silence doesn’t sound the same to me anymore. It’s more of a feeling – or more specifically, a lack of a feeling. After hours of swimming in bass vibrations, blanketed in shifting pressures in the dark, the silence in the cold air of a December morning in Minneapolis felt still. The silence registered on my skin. At the event I fall into step with hundreds of other people shaking their hips beneath strobes, away from the stillness of the outside. I don’t meet anyone new; it is enough of a task to speak with my friends. It is enough of a task to make reliable eye contact with my friends. I become lost in the continuous layering of different tracks, the relentless pounding of kick drums, the synthesizer pads breathing sighs of relief through 5 me over and over again, on and on. Beats and rhythms, harmonies and dissonances, suspensions and releases pour through my insubstantial skin into my knees that carry me, in place, to a world in motion. At one point I grip a vertical I-beam support that punctuates the dance floor and feel it pulsing. The whole building is dancing to these sounds. Everything is professional: the DJ, the audio engineering, the security, the bartenders, and the participants all know exactly what they are doing. And lots of things are illegal, including the off-duty cop stationed across the street. I gain a quick appreciation for the terrifying breadth of a world I had proposed to theorize, a world whose powerful effects I had radically underestimated. I am forced to acknowledge how unqualified I am to comment on dance music events in any capacity. At this event, I learn that I have no idea what raves are. At this event I learn that I probably have no idea about lots of stuff. What has since become clearer is that raves are just one type of event, and raving is just one type of activity that happens at multiple types of events. Considering this, the shape of my proposed project suddenly seems less viable, less stable. Its consistency, once solid and graspable, begins to melt. I watch as it drips through my fingers onto the concrete floor. My project had become a slightly effervescent and funky smelling puddle. Over the course of my graduate studies, and as I come into contact with other students and their own relationships to their objects of intellectual interest, my insecurities wane. I realize that scholars, especially in the humanities, are not all- knowing so much as ambitious – as I was at the beginning of my studies – or dedicated or skilled. Scholars are people who put a great deal of effort into experimenting with thought, regardless of the significance of experimental thought to their muses. They are not always the foremost experts on their topics, so much as they are skilled thinkers. Scholars dedicate resources to developing thinking skills to interact with the objects that catch their interests, not only to discover, reveal, or prove those objects. I have become comfortable with the fact that the objects that caught my interest are dance music events in the Twin Cities, MN. I am still by no means a foremost expert of those events, especially compared to the people who have been putting them on and participating in them for decades longer than I’ve had the capacity to imagine their 6 existence. Accordingly, my interest in dance music events does not aspire to a decoding, to any analytic interpretation of dance music events. An effort at such an interpretation would require much more research (and ambition). That is not to say that there are no interpretations to be made, or that they are somehow prohibited. Many people can and do offer direct readings of events; in fact, this is a common practice from smoking patios to the pages of zines to peer-reviewed publications (as readers will discover in the field survey). Dance floors excite the hermeneutic imagination in many. And as dance floors are social, these excited imaginations often come into being in conversations at and in direct reference to specific events. At dance music events, loose and experimental interpretations about dance music events abound. And that is not a bad thing. This dissertation, however, is not concerned with significations. It eschews interpretations for evocations of dance music events in the Twin Cities. This is in part because I do not have a fraction of the insight that would be required for an interpretive task. I do not have any understanding of audio engineering, which plays, to say the least, a significant role in the live production of electronic music. I have a limited exposure to the various musical techniques performers deploy at these events. I cannot say what dance music events in the Twin Cities are like before 2015, when I start attending them, beyond those histories and anecdotes circulating as dance music event mythology or shared with me by interlocutors. I have never had to develop a security or door policy. And I have not interviewed enough people who do have these various specialties to even gesture towards the workings, the effects, the powers of their knowledges. This dissertation interviews a strategically selected pool of people, rather than assembling a population and selecting a random sample from that population. In short, this project does not have the trappings required to attempt the audacious task of an analytic reduction of dance music events (or raves) to a formula, or even a set of formulas. Dance music events are much more than I can write. And unfortunately for you, they are much more than readers can hope to read. But that is something that readers, myself, and so many participants in these events have in common. These events are bigger than the people who sweat to the cause in so many different ways. People lose themselves because these events are massive, not only because they strategically 7 disorient people. So this dissertation begins with the understanding that dance music events are material that bear many interpretations because they are bigger than people, including puny researchers like myself. But this dissertation does not bring dance music events to readers’ attentions only to declare them untouchable and unbreachable and leave them unattended in their mysterious workings. Instead, it dives headfirst into their potentials and multiplicities. It brings readers to events with the knowledge that it does not have all the secrets, it does not know the formulae. It cannot hope to define all the mysterious workings, but lucky for readers, dancing is more participation in conversations than it is the elaboration of definitions. This dissertation highlights six themes that characterize certain dance music events in the Twin Cities: the materiality of sound, dancing, events, darkness, critique, and ineffability. These themes are conversation points that connect dance music events to each other and to other events. They are not an analytic frame or a hermeneutic that can interpret things like dance music events. The six themes show that dance music events reach outside themselves in multiplying relations. The six themes run through the whole dissertation. They relate writings about dance music events (1st Movement) to interviews with dance music event promoters (2nd Movement) and organize conversations between the two (3rd Movement). By studying writings and interviews, these themes seduces dance music events into conversations.

Why did you choose to study dance music events in the Twin Cities?

The only brief answer I have to that is: I lived there, I love it there, and they are the dance music events that caught my interest. (I‘ve been working on the long answer for a few years now, and you’re already several paragraphs into it.) I’ve also regularly attended dance music events in Atlanta, Berlin, and Houston, but never to the extent that I have in the Twin Cities. By the Twin Cities I mean to indicate an openended metropolitan area. Dance music events take place all over the Twin Cities in Uptown, South, Northeast, Dinkytown, North, and in both Downtowns. They take place in clubs, music venues, and bars, but also in empty lots and warehouses, near train tracks, and 8 on the banks of the Mississippi River. This dissertation does not offer comparisons between dance music events in different cities because it focuses its resources on studying the relations between serial events in the Twin Cities. The dissertation limits its scope to the Twin Cities because it is already multi-sited across six events, which illustrate each other.

Why have you now supplanted the word “rave” with the cumbersome “dance music events”?

Using “rave” as a technical term is a hopeless prospect. It is too caught up in historical and geographic specificities and questions of authenticity and appropriation, and it still bears fresh scars from its contemporary prohibitions. It has too many personal meanings for different people that span too many different contexts. Trying to work closely with the word, or even the concept, inevitably destabilizes the dissertation. Head-on is not a good way to study raves. In this project, raves are only one type of dance music event that comes to the fore. In the Twin Cities, raves exist in relation to multiple other types of events, including bar nights and warehouse parties and private parties and patio events and pop-up sound systems. Raving is just one type of activity that happens at multiple types of events, and that only makes sense in its relations to multiple other activities. This might be clarified by considering the experience of staff at dance music events. Even at true raves, bartenders are not usually engaged in the same activities as dancers are not engaged in the same activity as DJs are not engaged in the same activities as the people working the door. Raves and raving are aspects of dance music events, more generally. This project studies six dance music event series: Warehouse 1, Freak of the Week, House Proud, Techno Tuesdays, Communion, and The Headspace Collective. These events are among those in the Twin Cities that prioritize house and techno music. And although they are not all unilaterally ravey, these events each invoke the six reading themes noted above: dancing, darkness, the materiality of sound, ineffability, critique, and events. These six themes discover the six events in each other. In other 9 words, this dissertation studies six dark, critical, ineffable, immersive dance music events in the Twin Cities. There is a fair amount of raving going on in this material, but that’s not all.

So what’s up with religion?

This project maintains a non-essentialist understanding of religions and religious things. In this, it is a religious studies project, not a project about religions. It is born in a milieu of religious studies methodologies that theorize rituals, altered states and ecstasies, mythologies, and human interactions with forces that are irreducible to human affairs. It takes up these methodologies and turns to study dance music events. This might at first seem odd, because there is no question about the reality of dance music events, as is so often implicit in the materials that focus religious studies. Nonetheless, music – punctuating unpredictable transformations and tracing patterns in the cosmos – is as shrouded in mystery and confusion as miracle and magic. A series of articles entitled “Dance Floor Epiphanies” written by Taylor Bratches and published by the online music magazine Resident Advisor collects brief narrative responses to the question, “have you ever had an experience at a rave that’s moved you to the point of epiphany?” Two samples in the second roundup of personal stories evidence a non-essentialist but distinctly religious mentality regarding raving. In the first sample, Brand1 recounts a particular evening at a serial event in Chicago.

I was in a cypher with others, and each step on the floor breathed feeling into our bodies, moving us into a place of transcendence. I felt the waves and the phrase THIS IS CHURCH resonate through me. The dance floor became a place where people with similar mindsets, different hardships and a shared love of music could come together safely and rejoice. Where spirituality in the music intersected with the groove that came from movement. (Brand1 in Bratches, 5/28/20)

In the second sample, Meredith in Washington D.C. meditates on how she was affected by musical “brutalism” after starting treatment for stage four cancer.

Instead of finding a space to live it up in while waiting for more tumors to appear, raving uncovered feelings I didn't know I had and transmuted them. In the wake of the dissociative experiences of surgeries and chemotherapy, dancing has rooted me in a body, the present moment, and the earth. Some people call this healing. I am more comfortable imagining that I am living in- between, maintaining my ongoing presence in the physical world in the midst of my decay. The mystery, terror, joy and rage of that moment became the water that rolled, steamed and eventually poured off my body. (Meredith in Bratches, 5/28/20)

Both these samples reference events in the US, but the article series includes accounts that take place in Berlin, Glasgow, Sydney, Cape Town, Bogota, and Mexico City, and other places. Resident Advisor catalogues how transcontinental dance music events are related to epiphanies, and the popular narrativization and theorization of those. Accounts of “transcendent moments in the club” are characterized by popular and non- technical and non-essentialist religious language and concepts. More formally, writers publish about how dance music events are related to various religious studies theories and frameworks. As they encounter ecstatic experiences and oceanic feelings and collective effervescence and communitas and the grotesque, readers of this dissertation will note that religious studies finds many of its theorizations materializing in dance music events. One exemplary illustration of academic investigations into the question of the relationships between dance music events and religion is the 2004 anthology Rave Culture and Religion, edited by Graham St. John. In fifteen articles, this book investigates the religious experiences, ritual characters, and spiritualities of rave (St. John 2004, 6-7). St. John sets the stage in the introduction.

Electronic dance music culture is a truly heterogeneous global phenomenon, motivating new spiritualities and indicating the persistence of religiosity amongst contemporary youth. (St. John 2004, 2)

Tim Olaveson contributes the fourth article to Rave Culture and Religion, titled “‘Connectedness’ and the rave experience: rave as a new religious movement?”, and in it he poses an explicit version of the question of the relationship between dance music events and religion. Olaveson asks to what extent the connectedness reported by 11 people at dance music events resembles collective effervescence and communitas in a discussion about whether this resemblance would qualify dance music events as New Religious Movements.

Scholars of rave, post-rave and other dance cultures have recently suggested that these movements may be viewed as NRMs [New Religious Movements]. My own research on the central Canadian rave scene supports these conclusions to a limited extent. While it may not be entirely accurate to call rave culture(s) NRMs, there is clearly something important happening at both individual and societal levels. In particular, one of the central features of the rave experience – the experience of connectedness – is often interpreted by ravers as a religious experience. Further, the experience of connectedness is a key element in ritual performances and religious and sociocultural revitalization as these have been modelled by Emile Durkheim, Victor Turner and other prominent scholars of religion. When viewed in this light, the development and primary characteristics of rave cultures should not surprise us. Rave is just the latest example in the process of sociocultural revitalization that underlies the development of all religions and the health and regeneration of cultures throughout human history. (Olaveson, 100)

Olaveson concludes that connectedness connects dance music events and New Religious Movements both to the theories of scholars (specifically the canonical Durkheim and Turner) who specialize in sociotheoretical studies of religion. As evidence for this conclusion, Olaveson offers an anecdotal review of the general parallels between New Religious Movements and dance music events that is worth quoting, again, at length.

To varying degrees, rave and dance cultures contain several features common to NRMs: cultural and social dissatisfaction and disaffection by potential members; occurrence within host cultures with decaying and declining religious symbols, rites and institutions; occurrence within host cultures of religious and social pluralism and accelerated intercultural communications and technology; religious iconography appropriated syncretically from other traditions; hallucinatory, ecstatic or altered consciousness experiences transpiring in embodied, visceral and emotional states; radical personality transformation as a result of such ecstatic experiences; the creation of ‘surrogate’ family and community units and support mechanisms; the formation of ideal or utopian social visions and programmes; charismatic leadership and the development of cultic formations in the form of the DJ and his/her followers; and opposition and resistance from existing authorities, social institutions and power structures (the technique of 12

‘deviant’ labelling; the fear, similar to other NRMs, that the practice of raving ‘breaks up families’; and regulatory measures introduced in many states and metropolitan centres around the world) and the concomitant adaptation of ritual performances (licensed raves, more ‘underground’ raves). (Olaveson, 99)

The proliferating potential comparisons between specific dance music events and specific religious events abound, and this abundant potential also characterizes dance music events in the Twin Cities. There, explicit religious themes are common. DVS1, an interlocutor for this dissertation, recalls two memorable events that he promotes upon his return from an extended absence in the early aughts.

I came back, and that’s when I planned a big party called Resurrection in 2000, and then Ascension happened in 2001. (From interview with DVS1)

Further to the point, one of the serial dance music events studied in this dissertation is named Communion. Another interlocutor, Centrific, muses over his choosing of the name when he started the event with two partners in 2007.

I did want it to be kind of a spiritual thing, and I did want it to be a gathering that was a little bit more deep. I think at the time I had looked up what Communion actually meant and it was basically, “a public display of what we believe in.” And I was like, “Oh that works.” (From interview with Centrific)

Dance music events – as a global phenomenon, as an object of scholarly inquiry, and in the Twin Cities – are at least a bit religioush. But this should by no means lead readers to conclude that religion is the essence of dance music events, or that dance music events are the essence of religion. Certainly neither is reducible to the other. And anyway, this work has little to do with essences, musical or religious. Instead of an analytic question, that of the relationships between dance music events and religions is (at the time of writing) a personal one. I have been dominated by this question for close to a decade. It has outlasted multiple stages of my life, several friends-forever, and any number of opportunities for professional development. Travelling to and attending dance music events consumes a good deal of my resources, temporal, emotional, and financial alike. Consideration of the impact of this question on my life becomes difficult if I try to determine, for example, the financial cost of this 13 question, if only because this question is also the source of my paycheck. Like a weird monster lodged in my ears and hips, this question spends its own money on itself. Even after the COVID-19 shutdown triggers widespread cancellation of dance music events, I find myself in a dark basement surrounded by turntables, digital media players, mixers, synthesizers, speakers, and records. This question of the relationships between dance music events and religion is with me as I lie awake in silent stillness as crystal clear music courses through my body. It’s my imagination. I’m imagining it. It is not real. But does that do justice to what I’m hearing, to whatever is pounding my chest and tickling the nape of my neck? Dance music events have incorporated me, and the music doesn’t leave me just because I’m not located at one all the time. Perhaps it is not surprising that this question has come to bear great significance for me, after it has held me for longer than most things in my life. In many ways and for many people, I am reducible to this question. I promise myself that nothing is reducible to anything else, but it’s hard to maintain this conviction when I’m held in the overwhelming embrace of dance music events. Fortunately, I am not here pressed to provoke conversation about myself so much as the latter. So this dissertation begins by finding its fundamental ground in an undergirding and openended question concerning the relationships between dance music events and religions. It takes this question as a domain for explorations and conversations, a multidimensional expanse delimited only by receding horizons.

Negations for Specifications In the spirit of academic precision, this dissertation requires a moment to specify and delimit the scope of this modest project, and to distinguish it from projects that are similar. This project has the ambition of leading readers to dance music events by eliciting conversations between writings about dance music events and interviews with dance music event promoters. It embraces socio-economic, cultural, and historical theorizations as routes that these conversations take, but it is not a social economics, an ethnography, or a history. 14

This study is not an analysis of the Twin Cities music economy. The Cities have a thriving culture industry with nationally renowned local music spanning several genres (from Prince to Husker Du to Lizzo). The Cities are also home to several iconic music venues, including First Avenue and the Varsity Theatre. Some of the texts reviewed in the field survey describe economic relations of music scenes and genres, and there is a great deal of relevant material for consideration in the economic relations between scenes and genres and venues and artists and event participants in the Twin Cities. The relationships between local scenes and the local institutions of a decentralized and globalized music industry are vibrant in the Twin Cities. Just like everywhere else, everybody is trying to figure out how to dance and make music in their local economic realisms. But this dissertation will not offer a diagram of the socio-economic conditions of dance music events. It does not work with details about competitive marketplaces to render a thesis about the authentically-underground-and-thereby-effectively-resistant economic materialism of dance music events in the Twin Cities. This dissertation focuses on using six reading themes to enter into conversation with dance music events that do indeed take place in overlapping and interconnected musical economies. And these conversations will encounter folded issues like the questions of the professional pursuit of underground music, authentic musical ecstasy, and correct aesthetic intentions. But these conversations do not conclusively theorize these issues. This study is not a dance floor ethnography. It does not seek to lay out a culture, a collective imaginary, or the hierarchies of social relations between people. Some of the texts reviewed in the field survey have ethnographic priorities and conduct prolific research into a set of conditions to offer interpretations of their material. And such work would not be out of place in the Twin Cities where many groups participate in dance music events in many capacities for many different reasons. An aggregation and synthesis all of these groups and people would generate a wealth of perspectives on social lives in the Twin Cities and would surely bear fruit of analytic value. But such an ethnographic rendering of dance music events in the Twin Cities is far beyond the scope of this project. It does not seek to emplace dance music events in a community spirit, nor does it import to them a psychological purpose. If described in 15 social scientific terms, the domain of this project is closer to basic research than theorization. It experiments with using six reading themes to lead readers into conversations already buzzing at dance music events. The elicitation of these conversations is the priority, not the analysis of their conditions. This study is not a history of Twin Cities dance music events, or of a specific scene amongst other specific scenes. There are many histories of many people, places, and events, and there are abundant dissenting voices that offer alternatives to those accepted narratives in the Twin Cities. Furthermore, there are a number of dance music scenes in the Cities upon which this dissertation does not touch. In addition to the techno and house focused events studied here, psytrance, EDM, and ambient events all maintain reliable followings.1 And these genres of dance music events do not begin to evoke all of the music events in the Twin Cities where hip hop, swing, rock, bluegrass, and folk each signify their own domains of serial events with different relationships and lively communities. The dissertation considers none of these. Lastly, this study does not seek to emplace dance music events in the Twin Cities in relation to any more general, global, or cosmic diagram. Of course, it does not question that dance music events have been happening probably since people have been people. And this dissertation also presumes that dance music events will continue to happen in many different forms long into the future, for people in general and with specific respect to the Twin Cities. But that might be testament to their multiplicities as much as their consistencies. So this dissertation does not emplace the dance music events it studies in any grand transcontinental cultural trajectories, in a distinct coordinated movement of Earthling culture through time. In this study, narratives lead readers to events rather than to interpretations.

1 This footnote provides musical examples from the Twin Cities. Techno: Evolve by DVS1 . House: Type Uh Thank by Jeff Swiff . Psytrance: Logical Machine by Gaia’s Sonic Tribe . EDM: Everybody is Not Enough by Jay Strangelove: . Ambient: excerpt 2 by mount curve . 16

Charting a Course A brief note on the movements that make up this dissertation might provide readers some initial orientation. This project is shaped like a research report in that it comprises three main movements. (1) A survey of the literary field precedes (2) a presentation of research findings that is followed by (3) a series of conversations. Each movement contains several shorter sections. The first movement attends to nineteen writings in seven sections, the second movement attends to eight interviews in nine sections, and the third movement attends to six conversations in eight sections. In the first movement, a field survey introduces precedents in writings about dance music events. Many scholars and writers have taken up the task of putting dance music events to the page, so this movement conducts a review of pertinent literature. This movement contextualizes the dispositions and priorities the dissertation brings to the study of dance music events in the Twin Cities. It consults historical, sociotheoretical, popular, and experimental writings to sample the many different types of dance music events that might catch a writer’s attention. The writings take root in London, Sydney, Anjuna, Detroit, Toronto, Berlin, Saturn and elsewhere. They draw musical, economic, and historical connections amongst these sites and others. In the second movement, interviews with the promoters of the six events under discussion shuttle readers to the Twin Cities. I attend these promoters’ events throughout 2019 and 2020, so I am acquainted with their products before engaging them in interview. Many of these promoters also frequent dance music events socially, and I spend hours on various dance floors with some of them before ever sitting down for a spoken conversation. Perhaps due in part to these factors, I achieve a reliable rapport with these promoter interlocutors and have exciting and informative conversations about their works, interests, and passions for dance music events. This movement also includes descriptions of the events in question derived from field notes and openly accessible internet resources. The third movement of this dissertation holds conversations between dance music events in writings and dance music events in the Twin Cities via the six reading 17 themes. This movement interweaves quotes and excerpts highlighted in the first two movements to suggest and experiment with the relationships between the different themes with which dance music events materialize. This section enriches grounds for ongoing conversations rather than achieving the resolution of a conclusion. It is my personal conviction that dance music events in the Twin Cities have a great deal of material to contribute to contemporary religioush conversations. But the material put forth in the coming pages should serve mostly to enliven readers’ own questions regarding these relationships, rather than to prove my own convictions. The treatment of the material should assist readers in treating their own, personal dance music event materials. And, perhaps most significantly, it should be effective. This project should guide readers in exploring paths that lead to and from dance music events, just in case anybody ends up wanting to boogie.

0.2: Reading Themes

One task remains before investigating material, and that is an introduction to six themes that will lead readers to conversations that are already happening in writings about dance music events in general and at dance music events in the Twin Cities. This section also indicates that these conversations spill outside the strict domains of writings about dance music events and dance music events in the Twin Cities by grounding each theme in scholarly literature that is adjacent and relevant to – but not strictly about – dance music events. These grounding texts show that events, the materiality of sound, dancing, darkness, critique, and ineffability are hot topics beyond dance music events.

Events The first reading theme this dissertation targets is events. This is appropriate especially because the materials that focus this dissertation are dance music events. So this dissertation has the humble goal to study its material as what it is: namely, serial events. The holding fast to this theme is grounded in Lotte Meinert’s and Bruce Kapferer’s 2015 In the Event: Towards an Anthropology of Generic Moments. Their anthology collects nine articles that take topics as varied as rituals, political demonstrations, and disasters to experiment with and argue for the viability of an anthropology of events. Kapferer states this forthrightly in the introduction to the anthology.

The concern with events and situations in this book seeks to extend beyond … more or less conventional usages and to argue for a deepening of the methodological significance of events and situations in anthropological ethnographic practice. (Kapferer, 1)

The conventional usages Kapferer references position events as “exemplifications or illustrations” of society, or of sociostructural dynamics. In Kapferer’s critiques of such uses, scholars treat events as inadequate illustrations of social diagrams. 19

Kapferer readily acknowledges that events are not singularities, transcendent or individual. They are connected, first of all, to other events.

The relation between apparently larger, encompassing molar processes and local or small everyday interactive events is of major issue in any analysis based in events …. (Kapferer, 12)

But according to Kapferer, these encompassing processes are not reliably identifiable as discrete social structures, as units of community. They themselves are series of many everyday events.

What counts as an event for analysis is highly problematic, and there is always a risk that the event merely becomes ‘Society’ writ small—a micro representation of society or systems that, furthermore, is often treated as representing the dynamic processes of the whole. (Kapferer, 12)

Kapferer argues that there is a methodological precedent in anthropology for a study of events that pushes events beyond suggestive significations and representations of society.

… anthropologists have been grappling with the potential of event analysis for some time and have already demonstrated the value of such an approach, well beyond the treatment of the event as a mere exemplification or illustration of what is already known. (Kapferer, 17)

The “Introduction” of In the Event checks in with events in the works of several canonical anthropologists. Readers encounter Max Gluckman’s situational analyses, Victor Turner’s social dramas, and the debts of contemporary anthropology to the philosophies of Deleuze and Guattari (Kapferer, 9 and 16). Although neither was an anthropologist, Kapferer describes their influence on anthropology as one that dovetails conveniently with the field’s focus on events.

The Deleuzian turn to the event is part of a general approach that strives to break away from various oppositions and exclusivist positions that, for example, overprivilege the individual subject or the idea of society as a coherent totalized order. (Kapferer, 15) 20

And it is more than Deleuze and Guattari’s critical endeavors that Kapferer discovers in contemporary anthropological projects. Their attention to events is furthermore relevant to posthumanisms, materialisms, and Marxisms, and contemporary social scientists in general.

For some social scientists, we are in an era of the post-human … and must therefore take into account forms of agency, effect or constructional impetus other than those created by human beings. In other words, constructions of reality are embedded in processes that are not entirely of human invention; they are able to exert an effect on human being because they are insensible to human action. There is a reinsistence on a certain materialism, which is already powerfully apparent in Marxist perspectives and, I consider, in some phenomenology, in what may be glossed as post-structural directions. (Kapferer 19)

Kapferer positions the articles comprising In the Event at the precipice of “the Deleuzian turn to the event”. With a touch of poetic flair, he suggests the articles themselves embody a dynamic, openended becoming typical of Deleuzian events.

The chapters here express various lines of inquiry involving what can be broadly termed event analysis within the spectrum that has been presented in the foregoing discussion. They can be regarded as part of an ongoing discourse and in various ways represent different positions. … Thus, the chapters in this book might be considered events themselves—particular points in the development of specific ethnographic understandings and, most importantly, approaches that may offer a variety of analytical directions via a focus on events. The book as a whole should be considered as a kind of becoming, offering varying and still developing approaches to ethnographic methodology that are framed by a concern with the event as the grounds as well as the plane of emergence for analytical and theoretical knowledge. (Kapferer, 17)

For Kapferer, each article in the book is simultaneously about events and itself an event or series of events. And perhaps thinking of the text as events is more fitting than its poetics initially imply, considering the book’s origins in series of seminar courses.

The impetus and inspiration for the chapters that are presented in this book arose from two research seminars on event analysis … in 2008 and 2009. (Kapferer, 17) 21

In the Event, inspired by series of events, presents several events that study events. The eighth chapter in the anthology provides a particularly intriguing discussion of an event with important musical features. In “Figurations of the Future: On the Form and Temporality of Protests among Left Radical Activists in Europe”, author Stine Krøijer describes a situation in which protesters and a samba band were trapped and temporarily immobilized en masse by police. This event takes place in 2009 at NATO’s sixtieth anniversary summit in Strasbourg, France. As Krøijer, the samba band, and several others trek with a group onto a long bridge, riot police execute a strategic and opportunistic disruption of their movement.

As we walk up the bridge, three rows of riot police, protected by anti-riot helmets and shields and tactical knee, arm, and chest pads, obstruct our retreat. …The police line moves forward quickly and, aided by portable fences, pushes the samba band and everybody else ahead, while the drummers struggle to keep time. We are squeezed together in what I later learn is called a ‘kettle’—police jargon for the temporary confining of protestors. … In our kettle on the bridge, the samba band continues to play against a background of silence. The refrain “This is what democracy looks like!” is shouted repeatedly. When it was played at the blockade in the morning, I thought it referred to our control of the street. Now, however, it sounds more like a reference to police repression. (Krøijer, 144)

The police intensify pressure by further reducing space and autonomy for the people in the kettle.

When the first line is pressed back by the police, it instantly produces a collective wave among the protestors that rolls back and forth, with the rhythmic drumming of the samba band giving us a shared pulse. We have become one body acting together: a movement in one part instantly exerts an influence on the rest. I am filled with a strong sense of strength and solidarity, mixed with fear. Nobody moves or talks. The air is full of a vibrant tension, and I observe the jaw muscle of the nearest police officer turning white as he fixes his gaze somewhere above my head. … It is a long terrifying moment of possibility in which I mostly feel our own collective breathing. (Krøijer, 144)

Under forceful pressure from riot police and to the tune of a samba band, a group of protesters are consolidated into a bodily synchronicity (Krøijer, 147). This body is dependent on the conditions in which it finds shape, and quickly dissolves when these conditions change. 22

After some 15 minutes, the riot police withdraw without a word, and we are allowed to walk away. People start talking again. We hug and laugh, and some even start dancing in the street. … The elation is tinged with anger and a rare sense of power, which seems rather odd, given that we did not have the upper hand in the situation. I observe the large water cannon pulling away. Someone pops open a red fire hydrant to allow everybody a sip of water. (Krøijer, 144-145)

The remainder of Krøijer’s article meditates on and analyzes the events of the kettle. She settles on a theorization of what she calls “active time”: the ability of protesters, through events, to realize the futures that so often elude them.

I think of these moments as a state of ‘active time’ in which some of the ideals that activists struggle for temporarily become real and concrete, a bodily otherwise in the here and now of the confrontation. (Krøijer, 147)

Krøijer never writes explicitly regarding the nature of this future that the activists bring into being, and it might seem a peculiar theorization considering the depressing, debilitating experience of being dominated by armed police. But it might be that the “ideals that activists struggle for” are something as basic as: to be taken seriously as something different than the police, as part of something that is not reducible to the armed state. Contemporary activists maintain a constant struggle to differentiate themselves from the realisms imposed by citizenship, consumer complicity, and the requirements of survival in the urban West. Krøijer’s activists realize this desired differentiation in ongoing series of events, in instances of domination by military tactics and technologies and physical opposition to police authority. At these moments, activists are realized as a single body that is clearly defined by the forces of reality that they often only theoretically oppose. This reading clarifies Krøijer’s second interpretation of the protest chant, “This is what democracy looks like.” In this second interpretation, the chant is a scathing realism: it describes in song the policed-by-military lives of democratic citizens. Krøijer’s article is important to this dissertation for two reasons. The first is, most basically, because it describes the series of events of a group of people becoming a musical body in opposition to a police force. The second is because this specific kettling event connects In the Event to anti-police protests that sweep through the Twin Cities 23 after the murder of George Floyd in 2020. At a protest on November 4th, police kettle Twin Cities demonstrators with a sound system van, and the protesters respond with a dance party. The relationships between the events of the 2020 Twin Cities protests and dance music events in the Twin Cities, and between the events of the 2009 NATO protests and 2020 Twin Cities protests is discussed in section 3.7. As readers investigate the next theme, the materiality of sound, they discover that in certain events music supplants other material conditions, such as the threat of police violence, as the strongest condition that determines bodies and ushers in alternative realities.

Materiality of Sound Because it is not only music that envelopes people at dance music events, but also effects, feedback, silences, this dissertation opens itself and readers to the different types of sound that are significant at dance music events. This reading theme is grounded in Salomé Voegelin’s Sonic Possible Worlds: Hearing the Continuum of Sounds (2014). Voegelin is an art critic whose primary concern is writing about sound art to offer alternative perspectives in contemporary art and art criticism, specifically in the domain of installation art pieces. According to Voegelin, sound art offers a specific physical immersion; it demands that people who would experience it must inhabit it.

To travel into the world of the work as into a sonic fiction means to travel into its temporospatial expanse, the affective geography of its materiality, and to come to understand the work and ourselves through inhabiting its invisible topography. (Voegelin, 82)

Sound art projects evidence multiple worlds. They impose sonic material that alters an environment to the point of physically delimiting it in relation to the world outside the work. In a note on landscape recordings, Voegelin extrapolates on this idea of immersion in the other places of the materiality of sound and the affective effects it has upon people.

The experience and sense we gain from these worlds is not about them but about how we live temporarily in the environment they provide us with through sounds, and words, and voices, which we take back with us as a sensibility to re- actualize our actual world in its plurality. ... Their soundscapes, through their 24

fictionality, are actual sonic environments for the time that I listen to them. I engage with their semantic materiality and feel reciprocated by it as in a phenomenological life-world: intersubjectively constituted by the sonic possible world generated in my inhabiting, glimpsing a different knowing of place and geography through my walking through, which I will not be able to shake off on the way home. (Voegelin, 35)

Sound art’s materiality dissipates illusions of separation between viewer and art piece at the same time that it dissipates illusions of agreement between all possible worlds. Voegelin refers to the materiality of sound using several modifiers. On the one hand she discusses the “invisible”, “ephemeral”, and “unseen” materiality of sound on several occasions (Voegelin, 6 and 18 and 70). On the other hand, she emphasizes the role a concrete materiality of sound plays in any ethics that values participation (Voegelin, 88). For Voegelin, this concrete materiality is far from some inert and impassive substance.

Sound … generates the fleshly simultaneity of the world that builds its shape as the formless passing of the entanglement of all there is. Listening is a sensory- motor action toward the world, which thus is the crossing not the crossed. Hearing is participle and generative, creating the world and the things continuously in all their vitality from my moving within and toward myself also. The sonic thing is not inert: it is not a fixed shape, form, and identity; rather, it is formless and shape shifting. It has self-transformative power, an agency that meets my transformative power, my agency in our encounter. … There is no ideality in this meeting; we are not on either side of a bridge but in the middle of the water, knee deep in whatever it is we are in. (Voegelin, 106)

“How’s the water?” asks one fish. “What’s water?” asks the other in reply. For Voegelin, sound art projects are seas traversed by currents local and transoceanic alike, churning, throwing up waves. And they are deep. “Sound is the depth of the visual spectacle”, but also of the invisible (Voegelin, 56).

Sonic worlds are … are concrete in their materiality inviting a concrete perception and a concrete subjectivity to respond to the demand of their invisibility, without simply making them visible. Thus, sonic worlds trigger not the production of visibility, but are the unseen action of the visual world, the blind mobility, the invisible slice, that is not guessed at or logically deduced from the seen, but needs to be explored in its sonic depth. (Voegelin, 54)

For Voegelin, people can become attuned to these depths of the visible and invisible by listening to sound art. Her project in Sonic Possible Worlds is to extend these tuning effects of sound art to sound art criticism, philosophical writing more generally, and potentially social norms. This is the impetus for her proposal of a sonic materialism, a shift in sensibility away from visual paradigms towards a philosophy of sound.

Sonic materialism proposes to pursue a phenomenological materialism that engages in the reciprocity of being in the world and the world being the commingling of all the slices of its possibilities, complex, plural, and possibly at times unintelligible and unreliable but felt and lived. It tries to grasp the experience of the mobile and unseen thing of sound in thought and speech, to make it count and impact on the actuality of the work and of the world. (Voegelin, 87)

For Voegelin, the invisible is always full of active material, always multiple (Voegelin, 91). A sonic sensibility that understands this can be drawn out of sound art into art criticism, everyday perspectives, and philosophy, but also into more visual domains.

The critique of the visual is not a critique of its object but of its practice, the way we look rather than what we see. There is the option of listening to the visual, listening to the thick layers that mobilize our view if we take care to confront it with a sonic sensibility. (Voegelin, 5)

When directed towards the visible, a sonic sensibility asks how we are caught up in the material of what we see and don’t see. Voegelin strongly advises that sound inform, in this way, considerations and constructions of art, infrastructures, and psychologies. Voegelin’s proposals are ambitious, and they borrow their force from a fundamental conviction.

Sound proposes a different perception of human identity and materiality. (Voegelin, 117)

This dissertation adopts Voegelin’s concrete materiality of sound and seeks it out in the materials it studies: dance music events. As immersive environments characterized by loud, continuous music and emphases on the deemphasis of visibility, dance music events are already enacting the extension of a sonic sensibility out of the domain of 26 sound art installation into the more mundane everyday of leisure activities. At one point, Voegelin seems almost to invite her adaptation to the continuous mixing of beats and rhythms by house and techno DJs typical of dance music events in the Twin Cities.

This is a musicality not delineated by genius, perfection, and the right interpretation of a piece of work, which protects a specialism from outside influence and interference. Rather, it is a sensibility that invites outsiders to practice the imperfections of the body on the inexhaustible flow of sound. (Voegelin, 124)

This dissertation will attend to references to the materiality of sound, as it is grounded in Voegelin’s work, throughout the textual materials it puts forward. This is a common topic of conversation with regard to dance music events, and it obtains significance in several different contexts.

Dancing Dancing is a common theme in the activities, social relations, and music that typify dance music events, and it is one of the major reasons people attend dance music events in the Twin Cities. Through attention to this theme, readers of this dissertation will become familiar with the ways promoters and writers engage with the various effects and functions of dancing. To ground dancing as a reading theme, this dissertation turns to two works by Angela McRobbie. The first is her contribution to the anthology Meaning in Motion: New Cultural Studies of Dance (1997), titled “Dance Narratives and Fantasies of Achievement”; and the second is her earlier essay “Shut Up and Dance: Youth Culture and Changing Modes of Femininity” from her book Postmodernism and Popular Culture (1994). These two texts both make reference to “social dance” and “pop dancing”, a loose category in which McRobbie finds raves. This dissertation takes up McRobbie’s theorizations to contextualize dancing as a reading theme that focuses conversations about dance music events. McRobbie’s starting point is the general paucity of scholarly work on social dance.

As a leisure practice, as a performance art, and as a textual and representational form, dance continues to evade analysis on anything like the scale on which other expressive forms have been considered. (McRobbie 1997, 207)

In “Dance Narratives and Fantasies of Achievement”, McRobbie guides readers through her responses to this paucity and her proposal of a sociology of dance. This subdiscipline would not be reducible to the methodologies and interests of performance studies, perhaps specifically because her considerations of dance extend to popular leisure activities.

A sociology of dance would have to step outside the field of performance and examine dance as a social activity, a participative form enjoyed by people in leisure, a sexual ritual, a form of self-expression, a kind of exercise and a way of speaking through the body. (McRobbie 1997, 211)

McRobbie’s article proceeds to analyze images of dance in popular fiction, film, and TV series. These media lead her to a definitive conclusion regarding the symbolism of dancing in her domain of interest: popular culture.

Dance operates as a metaphor for an external reality which is unconstrained by the limits and expectations of gender identity and which successfully and relatively painlessly transports all its subjects from a passive to a more active psychic position. What is charted repeatedly in these stories is this transition from childhood dependency to adolescent independence, which in turn is gained through achievement in dance or in the performing arts and therefore in the outside world. (McRobbie 1997, 217)

In the resources McRobbie consults, social dancing is a metaphor; it represent breaking the limits of reality. But for McRobbie, there is a great deal more interpretive work for sociologists to do. Indeed, she remains indignant at the persistence of a strange, sustained lack of sociological and cultural studies attention to dancing.

… despite the absence of a sociological language which would embrace the formal dimensions of dance, there is nonetheless a diversity of wider social questions and issues which are immediately raised by even the most superficial consideration of dance. Some of the most richly coded class practices in contemporary society can be observed in leisure and in dance. The various contexts of social dancing tell us a great deal about the everyday lives and expectations of their participants. Dance marks out important moments in the life- 28

cycle and it punctuates the more banal weekly cycles of labour, leisure, and … the “freedom of Saturday night.” (McRobbie 1997, 211)

McRobbie considers the difficulty of interpreting social dancing from the perspectives of sociology or cultural studies more intimately in an essay that she published three years earlier in her collection Postmodernism and Popular Culture. In this essay, “Shut Up and Dance: Youth Culture and Changing Modes of Femininity”, McRobbie begins and concludes with narratives that reflect on her position as a mother picking her teenage daughter up from raves. For the life of her, McRobbie just doesn’t “get” what the heck her daughter likes so much about this “working-class masculinity shirtless, sweating, en masse, in the hangars of the rave party” (McRobbie 1994, 168).

What, for example, are the debates and dilemmas which go through my head as I wait anxiously for my daughter to return from all-night raves? I find that the pleasure and excitement which my daughter and her friends experience as they discover new clubs and locations for raves, as they get to know new people inside the raves and as they uncover places and spaces where raves carry on and wind down when the clubs shut, are all clouded by my own fears and even panic about a number of things including drugs (‘Is it possible to enjoy the music without the drugs?’); the people (i.e. men or boys) they meet; the dangers of being in cars driven by boys who have taken E; the dangers of being in such large crowds of people (‘Do they have fire and safety regulations?’ I ask, nervously) – in fact almost every conceivable part of rave which contributes to its attraction, and to its thresholds of thrill and excitement. (McRobbie 1994,173)

To be sure, her position as a parent with a child caught up in a “culture of avoidance and almost pure abandonment” doesn’t do McRobbie any favors in the way of hermeneutical objectivity, but she still attempts a few interpretations in the spirit of a sociology of dance (McRobbie 1994,172). Most significant for the extrapolation of dancing as a reading theme is her understanding of social dancing.

Dancing provides the rationale for rave. Where other youth subcultures have focused on street appearances, or have chosen live rock performances for providing the emblematic opportunity for the display of style, in rave everything happens within the space of the party. (McRobbie 1994,169)

As it discovers a closed and functional loop, McRobbie’s interpretation ends up more mechanical than representational. This loop leads to the crucial work in “Shut Up and 29

Dance” which is not hermeneutical so much as methodological. McRobbie discusses how hermeneutic approaches to social dancing, rave, and dance music events are reductive. She argues that the project of interpreting dance music events as representations of culture or society fails to account for the dynamics of the worlds at play in subcultural economies, musical movements, and aesthetics of resistance. She offers a risky critique of her own work, flirting with accusing herself of the textualization of living people’s days-to-days.

In my own earlier work so much effort was put into attempting to problematize the marginalized experience of girls in youth culture that it never occurred to me to explore this further and find out what exactly they were doing on a day-to-day basis. (McRobbie 1994,160)

McRobbie’s notions of resistance, community, identity, and culture are shifting, dancing at dance music events in front of her very eyes. But something remains the same.

What remains are the same old cultural cocktails of dress, music, drugs, and dance and the way in which they create an atmosphere of surrender, abandon, euphoria, and energy, a trancelike state and a relinquishing control of energy. (McRobbie 1997 ,215)

This dissertation reads writings and interviews about dance music events for McRobbie’s understanding of social dancing as participation in dance music events. Dancing is not the only way to participate at dance music events, but this dissertation assumes that participation is what dancing at dance music events is.

Darkness Darkness spreads itself in multiple ways across the materials studied in this dissertation. It describes lighting, styles of music, types of events, phenomenological accounts, and historical conditions. To demonstrate that darkness bears multiple semantic loads, and that it is a generative theme with regard to dance music events, this dissertation grounds its use of darkness in Eugene Thacker’s 2014 article “Dark Media”. This article is the second chapter in Excommunication, a media studies book that includes three essays and a coauthored introduction with Alexander Galloway and 30

McKenzie Wark. The book’s “Introduction: Execrable Media” elaborates the authors’ central concept – excommunication – as a contribution specifically to the field of media studies. Excommunication, for the authors, emphasizes “mediations not of this world”, or in other words, interactions between different “ontological domains” (Galloway, Thaker and Wark, 20).

At the center of excommunication is a paradoxical antimessage, a message that cannot be enunciated, a message that is anathema, heretical, and unorthodox, but for this very reason a message that has already been enunciated, asserted, and distributed. (Galloway, Thaker and Wark,16)

In “Dark Media”, Thacker uses supernatural horror as an example of a specific type of excommunication. Supernatural horror, as a genre, encompasses a variety of religioush materials.

The concept of dark media offered here is just one example that asks us to bring approaches from philosophy, genre horror, and mysticism to a kind of occult variantology of media. Magic circles, grimoires, dowsing devices, spirit photography, ectoplasmic images, ghostly static on the radio, the possessed TV, the cursed videotape, and the webcam of the dead—in supernatural horror all these “really” exist in that they are not mere figments of the imagination, symptoms of mental illness, or the by-product of drug abuse. Their artifactuality is expressed in their pragmatic and material use as media objects. (Thacker, 140)

Thacker’s example materials – films, TV series, novels and graphic novels – that excite or refer to the excitement of supernatural horror designate one meaning of darkness found throughout this dissertation. According to this meaning, dark are those things (violence, drug abuse, depression) that are related to human horror. Reading for this meaning of darkness acknowledges that darkness enjoys general colloquial circulation as a thematic term in at least one popular marketplace. But for Thacker as for this dissertation, darkness bears an additional meaning, one more pertinent to excommunication. Darkness can also imply “The Realism of the Unseen” (Thacker, 81).

In each case mediation comes up against an absolute limit, while also mediating beyond what is normally expected. (Thacker, 133)

Dark are those media that interrelate pluralities of realities, but also those that indicate the interrelations and codependencies necessary to all media.

Dark media have, as their aim, the mediation of that which is unavailable or inaccessible to the senses, and thus that of which we are normally “in the dark” about. But beyond this, dark media have, as another aim, the investigation into the ways in which all mediation harbors within itself this blind spot, the minimal distance that persists in any instance of mediation, however unsuccessful or complete it may be. Dark media inhabit this twofold movement—seeing something in nothing … and finding nothing in each something …. (Thacker, 85)

This dissertation pursues both of the working implications of darkness in Thacker’s article. On the one hand, it seeks out instances of darkness implying horror; on the other hand, it seeks out instances of darkness as the emergence or presence of things from different ontological orders. Thacker bases discussions of dark media in examples that he finds in specifically supernatural horror films, novels, illustrated books, and TV series. He begins the article by reading Frederic Brown’s 1948 story “Knock”.

The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock on the door . . . (Thacker, 77)

For Thacker, this short story is dark because it communicates the always-ongoing relations between different orders of existence, between separate ontological domains. And it is also dark because it calls into being the twin tensional fears of loneliness and fear of others which are by implication horrifying or horrible, or at the very least the stuff of horror. Thacker also studies the films of Georges Méliès with great detail, and finds in Méliès’ monsters, demons, and ghosts many dark interactions between incommensurable realities.

In spite of Méliès’s overt humor, there is always something that recedes into a shadowy, unspoken region: the machine that shows us more truth than we are prepared to see, the magic that calls up forces beyond human comprehension, or the everyday apprehension of an invisible nexus of causality, behind the veil of what can be seen and heard and felt. (Thacker, 84)

On multiple occasions, Thacker describe darkness as something that occurs when media function better than people expect. In these instances, darkness ensues because media reveal to people that both media and people are caught up in more than is immediately apparent.

Likewise, are there also instances in which media work “too well,” that is, instances in which media and mediation seem to operate beyond the pale of human capacity or comprehension. (Thacker, 90)

To illustrate this dynamic in which media exceed their anticipated effects, Thacker turns to The Ring, a story and film that explicitly stages a magical and horrifying crossing- between-realms.

… there is a key scene in the film where a mysterious figure in the video crosses the threshold of the screen, actually emerging from the TV into the room in which the TV is being watched by a horrified viewer/character. In such moments, it is less the media object that is the source of horror, and more the fact of mediation itself that is horrific, a mediation that strangely seems to work all too well. (Thacker, 92)

Supernatural horror is brimming with media objects that exert horrifying forces on people, berating people into humble respect of darkness. But for Thacker, dark media are also compatible with the genre of supernatural horror because of the metaphysical implications they reveal and demand, which inevitably reduce the scope of human – not to mention individual – autonomy. People are not in control of media.

This means understanding media as not simply defined by on/off states or the obligation to stay connected, and not simply as technical conductors for a vitalistic, communicational flux and flow, but understanding media as embodying a basic paradox: mediation as those moments when one communicates with that which is, by definition, inaccessible. I will be calling this enigma—the mediation of that which cannot be mediated—dark media. (Thacker, 81)

Upon reviewing several examples of dark media, Thacker turns to resources in the domain of what he calls “medieval mysticism” for assistance in theorization of the concept. Using Augustine and Dionysus the Areopagite, Thacker definitively links dark media to religioush materials. 33

Nearly every account of mystical experience relies in some way on a union between the mystical subject and an enigmatic, inaccessible, and mysterious “outside” that is variously called God, Godhead, or the divine. As we’ve seen, the dominant paradigm for this is established by Augustine, who describes the divine as an “Unchangeable Light” that is beyond human vision, beyond anything that can be seen, and ultimately beyond human comprehension. This duplicity—accessible manifestation and inaccessible source—is especially marked in those mystical texts where the divine is almost paradoxically described in terms of darkness, shadows, or the abyss. We’ve seen this in Dionysus the Areopagite, who notes how the divine is in itself absolutely inaccessible, and is therefore an enigmatic “ray of divine darkness.” (Thacker, 125)

Thacker explores the metaphysical suggestions offered by both these mystics, reflects on Kant’s meditations about things and objects, and consults Jean-Luc Marion for perspectives on what the 20th Century mystic dubs saturated phenomena. According to Marion, not everything filters equally well through people’s understandings; people experience multiple sorts of things that exceed their perceptions, thereby pointing to the limits of the people’s perceptive faculties.

… there is no pre-existing category within which such phenomena can be adequately understood, or … their inconsistency and variability prevents them from adhering to the sensible form of intuition. By definition, such phenomena cannot be prepared for in advance, and in this failure of experience, the cognizing mind recognizes its own finitude and its own conditions. … Marion calls these “saturated phenomena,” and they range from the aesthetic experience of listening to music, to the ethical confrontation with a stranger, to the ongoing public contestation over the meaning of political events. While saturated phenomena do dovetail with the more common notion of experiences that are ineffable or sublime, Marion is careful to note that saturated phenomena have less to do with the shutting down of experience or cognition, than with a rift or sudden shift that ends up producing thought and language. … Borrowing from the Kantian framework, Marion argues in each case that saturated phenomena are related to the “categories” via their excess, by their “passing beyond the concept.” (Thacker, 120-121)

For Thacker, Marion’s fusion of dark media, things, and mystical theologies is exemplary of the supernatural in, as he terms them, post-secular cultures.

If examples such as these are any barometer for our post-secular culture, it appears that the supernatural has returned—not in the guise of answered 34

prayers or divinely sanctioned holy wars, but via the panoply of media objects that satellite us and that are embedded into the very material fabric of our bodies, cities, and lives. No longer is there a great beyond, be it in the topographies of the afterlife or the mythical journey of reincarnation. Instead, the supernatural is embedded in the world here and now, manifest via a paradoxical immediacy that constantly withdraws and cloaks itself. (Thacker, 96)

For Marion, as for Thacker, secular media bear the alternatively (or complementarily) ecstatic and horrifying intuition that very real things we cannot comprehend continue their knock knock knock knocking in the dark, eminently threatening to spill into and taint divine lights. This dissertation studies dance music events with and for these usages of darkness, to eventually stage conversations about the darknesses typical of dance music events.

Critique Multiple instances and types of critique run through this dissertation. Readers encounter critiques of: ideology, dominant intellectual disciplinary paradigms, mainstream culture, music and art scenes, and selves. In order to grasp these varied and multidisciplinary critiques, and to specify the word as a coherent reading theme, this dissertation grounds its uses of critique in François Cusset’s understanding of critique as presented in his book French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States (originally published in French in 2003; trans. 2008). French Theory is a good resource for this reading theme because Cusset argues that critique is the ingredient missing from understandings in the US of poststructuralist French authors. He works to specify what he means by critique and how and why it is missing from a great deal of the history of poststructuralism in the US. More generally, the book is a reception history of the works of several French thinkers by universities in the US mostly during the 1970s and 1980s. Cusset tracks their travels and teaching commitments, contextualizes their early translations, and reviews reactions to and – more notably for Cusset – mutations of their theories and critiques. French Theory elaborates the “ferment of ideas” and “manner of thinking that was closely tuned to the new state of disorder of the world”, that serve an exciting charge to university intellectualism in the US during the 1970s and 1980s (Cusset, 288). 35

Cusset repeatedly differentiates critique as he understands it from the early liberal readings it sustains in universities in the US. He is particularly frustrated by what he presents as the liberties cultural studies takes using their French resources as theoretical models and justifications. In one pertinent tirade, Cusset is infuriated by the suggestion that poststructuralist thought could ever discover an icon of resistance in Madonna.

The most sophisticated tools of textual analysis and the new university penchant for metadiscourse were thus applied to subjects as wide-ranging as gansta rap, “Harlequin” romance readers, Star Trek fans, and even the supposed philosophical “subtext” of the Seinfeld series. The list also included the sports industry, fast-food culture, the craze for tattoos, and the resistance of a given culture against economic globalization. The obsession with the semiology and the accompanying political overinvestments of notions of “style” and “subtext” made some new experts in Cult. Studs. [cultural studies] lose sight of the larger picture of the cultural industry and commercial power. They replaced the old critical paradigm of the British Marxist theorists with stylistic microdescription, whether it be in the spirit of irony or complicity. This would explain how a study on “Madonna politics,” renamed Meta-textual Girl (in reference to her eponymous song “Material Girl”), can tackle such subjects as perversion, miscegenation, and a postmodern matriarchal system, without ever making reference to what lies beneath this political sphere—for example, the highly profitable Madonna industry and the way her image is marketed. (Cusset, 135)

As Cusset would have it, cultural studies in the US read Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. without their critiques of political economies. This leaves the latters’ texts open to a great deal of recontextualization and reinterpretation.

The French critique of authority was only peripherally applied to the current political and economic powers, and was instead reduced to a critique of the professor’s authority, of the canonical author, or the academic institution. (Cusset, 161)

By critique, Cusset means something more than pushing back against any immediately present source of authority; Cusset means specifically that critiques of authority should incorporate considerations of political economies. The university reception of poststructuralist writings in the US, only able to grasp molecular developments like 36 identity theories as “separable arguments”, fails to acknowledge the critique of global capitalism that undergirds so much of that imported work. For Cusset, this is unfortunate because it prevents political solidarity across specialized uses of poststructuralis thought as it is inevitably and continuously decontextualized and recontextualized.

Indeed, only an overall critique of capital would have provided proponents of the various voices of resistance, based on identity or postidentity, with the tools to form a political community. (Cusset, 159)

In the US, French theory is missing critique. To a certain extent, this is to be expected. Cusset connects this blind spot to the seemingly unbreachable infrastructural and ideological gap between university campuses and the public in the US.

The gap we have been discussing is, in a more banal sense, sociological. It brings us back to a familiar misunderstanding: an optical illusion that causes campus orators to mistake their partial academic sphere for the social whole. (Cusset, 158)

Although the public-academic divide, as understood by Cusset, is not immediately resolvable, French Theory does leak into academic-adjacent domains that are not entirely public, but also not entirely academic. The following passage reviews Cusset’s treatment of life in a university environment in the US. This is an environment where texts gain an everyday realism, where they are the material of social relations and the hermeneutical keys to shared realities and – more concretely – infrastructural priorities.

In other words, when certain American readers identify with Buadrillard’s theory of “simulation” or Foucault’s “subjugation,” and gain a sense of coherence from these theories, it is not through an existential distortion or naïve appropriation of the French text, on the premise of a fundamental difference between the text and the world, but a reciprocal permeation of both spheres. … French theory, in bypassing the accepted discourse of argument, and constantly reaffirming the motifs of dispersion and the multiple subject, encourages its readers … to lose themselves, to reach a position of quasi fusion with the text. (Cusset, 228)

For Cusset, reciprocal permeation refers to high degrees of agreement between social infrastructures and social imaginaries. Circumstances typified by reciprocal permeation foster potentially destabilizing feedback loops and unexpected harmonics that can 37 acquire value as critiques of ideologies. So although critique never reaches outside the campus-as-text-as-campus, students carry a certain degree of theory in them as they cycle out of textual immersion and back into realer worlds.

In this case, we might say that in the United States French theory continually “disappeared” into its effects. (Cusset, 262)

As critique becomes an aspect of the air people breathe, the efficacy of critique becomes difficult to evaluate. Cusset explores more infrastructural-textual reciprocal permeations in his considerations of postmodern architecture, especially in the US. Cusset notes the significance and effectiveness caused by …

… the surprisingly reciprocal permeation of the two forms of expression, with architecture turning toward deconstruction and theory suddenly focusing on the questions of urban centers and space. (Cusset, 242)

Architects in the US during this period textualize their work at the same moment social philosophies are turning to micropolitical studies of urban modernities. According to Cusset, this feedback loop of postmodern architecture is dominated by a fixation with realizing the material imbrications of books and buildings.

The resulting new relationship between space and building was literally, this time, textual in many respects …. (Cusset, 243)

As text becomes building becomes text, the forms space has in thought and the forms thought has in space all begin to dance.

With no set program other than drawing a critique of functionalism and the causalism that were inherent to architectural activity, through essays and roundtable discussions were elaborated the diffuse principles of a deconstructionist (or deconstructivist) architectural approach, which declared itself “nonanthropocentric” and “posthumanist.” In light of these new theories, architects aimed to play on the fragmentation of space, and reveal, in each project, the impossibility of achieving totality; to emphasize the notions of displacement and contamination; to replace planning with “events” orchestrated by the designer …; to highlight the underlying conflict between various 38

contradictory demands of the structure …; and finally, in more concrete terms, to train the first truly interdisciplinary architects. (Cusset, 244)

Using the example of postmodern architecture, Cusset demonstrates how French theory in the US, albeit still stripped of effective critiques, can induce unexpected effects in instances where it saturates or permeates the environment in which it is discussed. This suggests that the nature of critiques in particular immersive environments can be constitutive more than effective. Or in other words, critique and theory are still at play even when and where they continually disappear into their effects. Finally, and of particular pertinence to this dissertation, Cusset identifies a last occasion wherein theory disappears into its effects: dance music events. This dissertation turns to Cusset’s theorizations of critique because, in an indulgent aside, the otherwise staid Cusset draws convenient connections between critique and the “culture of subversion” found in and around dance music events (Cusset, 258). A subsection in French Theory titled “Cyborgs, DJ Decks, and Found Objects” studies electronic music, musicians, and their performances, all the while implying dance music events with references to “fans” and “crowds” (Cusset, 254-259).

Experimental DJs … were crucial figures of postmodern society as it was foreshadowed to American readers by French theory. This shadowy figure of the DJ, mixing music under an artistic pseudonym, heralds the twilight hour for star icons, the death of the author, and the dawn of an ironic recycling of influences, if only by erasing the clear boundary separating the listener from the composer (or musician). The DJ gradually substitutes the art of “sequencing,” with all its tricks and trends, for the creation myth, and guides his fans through the maze of a fragmented, molecularized, and generally decentered pop culture. Simply rearranging modernism’s “found objects” (by recontextualizing and subverting pop songs or remixing new versions of rock albums) is not enough; these DJs go further and explore the depersonalized world of postindustrial sounds, to experience the madness born out of the quivering waves that surround us, waves of sound, vibrations, and information. (Cusset, 257-258)

According to Cusset, it is to the tune of music made for dance music events in the 1990s that the critiques crucial to poststructuralist thought pop up off campus and into more public mixings of bodies in environments dominated by reciprocal permeations.

In summary, we see that it was through elements as disparate as jazz and “cutups,” theories of excess and creative misreading, artistic reappropriation … in a broad continuum of intensity and fragmentation, random citations, and sudden shifts in register that French theory became, in the United States, associated with this culture of subversion [dance music events]—and we should note that this link was born out of the actual practice of rearrangement, or a certain combination producing a real event, and was no longer created in the sheltered surroundings of universities, grounded in legitimate histories and established discourses. (Cusset, 258-259)

Cusset’s earlier discussions of reciprocal permeation hold a clue to contextualizing his fandom of dance music events, and to his presumptions of their promises. In general, Cusset likes things that fold into each other, like architecture and theory or campuses and philosophies. At sites like these, critique can become a colloquial precedent; it can predominate in collective imaginaries. In instances in which critique is caught up in reciprocal permeations, it can come to bear metaphysical weight, rather than only analytical force. For Cusset, the same might be true of dance music events. Cusset hints at this when describing how “many American and English DJs” discover inspiration Deleuze’s writings (Cusset,).

… the system constituted by the DJ, his or her turntables, and the crowd form a “desiring machine”; the musical trance it can produce allows fans to turn into “bodies without organs”; the brief snatches of music (“vinyl fragments”) undermined in the mix can be described as “sonorous blocks of affect,” whose “molecular flows” come together to form “chance sonic assemblages,” following the operations of cutting, scratching, and sampling performed live by the DJ on the decks. (Cusset, 257)

For Cusset, dance music events offer a further instance of the reciprocal permeation of critique and environment. Dance music events are the material effects into which poststructuralist thinking continuously disappears. Ultimately, Cusset allows for many possible shapes of immersive, critical environments characterized by reciprocal permeations. They might include a walk from the dorm to the seminar room, the view of Frank Gehry’s façade on the Weismann Art Museum in Minneapolis from a soft sandy beach across the Mississippi River, or the participation in a series of dance music events. All these different environments are 40 compatible if only they can hold tight to their different critiques of capital, of realisms, and of the historical present.

The future of worldwide theory is therefore … based on a limited, but crucial, alliance between approaches whose respective ethos, styles of thought, basic thematic preoccupations, and, above all, intellectual followers set them at odds, but whose common objective of forming an active critique of the historical present nonetheless unites them. (Cusset, 308)

The differences across all these different environments also signals to Cusset that, ultimately, the political resistance constituted by solidarity across such environments is not itself a single instant, a catastrophe, or an ecstasy. It is, rather, something closer to a series of series of events.

Since contemporary social movements have confronted the crucial question of difference, “… a new type of revolution is in the process of becoming possible,” this time in the present, stretching across the planes of certain strata in vivo, through various modes of desertions or, more tactically, of sabotage, but in any case far from the substantialist myth of the revolutionary Grand soir when all would suddenly change, an inaccessible horizon that has always been more fundamentally monotheistic than communist. (Cusset, 331)

French Theory provides stable ground for this dissertation’s use of critique as a reading theme. It should be affirmed that Cusset’s work on the history of scholarly ideas is much more thorough and rigorous than his work on dance music events, but it is with an ear to both these priorities that this dissertation takes French Theory’s work into the fold.

Ineffability In order to ground ineffability as a reading theme, the dissertation turns to the work Michael Gallope does in his 2017 book Deep Refrains: Music, Philosophy, and the Ineffable. In this book, Gallope demonstrates how five 20th Century philosophers find musical paradoxes productive for thought. He shows how, in the study of these five philosophers, “music allows us to grasp broader conundrums about the limits of representation and the inescapability of mediation” (Gallope, 246). For Gallope, where there is musical writing there is confused musical writing, but confused musical writing is 41 exactly correct. Certain objects are, in certain respects, ineffable, even as they excite study.

This book presumes that its [music’s ineffability’s] life is multicultural, expansive, relational, porous, and often vernacular. It is relevant in music with text, in opera of all kinds, in film music, protest music, electronic dance music, hip-hop, and soul music; it [ineffability] is a generic quality of the medium. (Gallope, 31)

For Gallope, ineffability is an intrinsic quality of multiple varieties of music. But the ineffable is no incitement to silence. Quite the contrary.

In fact, it may be that philosophy helps us understand how it is possible to confront the ineffability of music head-on—not as a romantic conceit or as a vitalist immediacy, but as a phenomenon saturated with potential significance that is mediated by form while remaining inexact in its meaning. (Gallope, 16)

Gallope takes up ineffability for its incitements to logorrhea, rather than for its silences. Accordingy, this dissertation looks to his discussions of music’s ineffability (and its multiplicities) as a reading theme for studying dance music events.2 Deep Refrains studies the relationships between the philosophies of musical ineffability developed by Ernst Bloch, Theodor Adorno, Vladimir Jankelevitch, Gilles Deleuze, and Felix Guattari. Gallope guides readers through close readings, but also close listening to the musical works that inspire these philosophers. He provides several insightful music theoretical readings of these musical works, decoding the “complex affective traffic” by studying the scores of several composers (Gallope, 163). The composers for whom Gallope provides music analysis of ineffability include but are not limited to Mozart, Beethoven, Mahler, Schumann, and Dvorack (Gallope: 100; 101, 135; 104; 163, 236; 185). Gallope suggests that a certain amount of variable but collective musical fluency exists among his philosophers with regard to music theory and the history of orchestral music, and he joins them in discussions of their musical preferences and priorities.

2 Further indicating the value of his input for this dissertation, Gallope is a professor at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. He also plays in a local drone band named IE . 42

It is, in this way, a synoptic analysis that weaves together a constellation of interlocking arguments. Its aim is to stage a conversation between four philosophers who have been summoned for the central purpose of making explicit a great number of unacknowledged philosophical relations, affinities, and disagreements among them. (Gallope, 8)

Gallope maintains throughout Deep Refrains that philosophy owes music a certain debt, in that the ineffability of music inspires in its encounters with and impacts upon philosophers. And furthermore, studying philosophical writings about music leads readers to different conceptualizations of what, precisely, constitutes and is constituted by ineffable materials like music.

… it explains how, among these intellectuals, philosophical thinking was destabilized, distorted, inspired, and enraptured by a common experience: the sensory impact of music. (Gallope, 8)

One instance of this destabilization is the paradox presented by Arthur Schopenhauer in The World as Will and Representation. Deep Refrains revolves around Schopenhauer’s contention that music is a “direct copy of the will” (Gallope, 41). Gallope quotes a canonical passage to emphasize the significance of Schopenhauer’s musical thinking to the philosophers he studies.

Thus music is as immediate an objectification and copy of the whole Will as the world itself is, indeed as the Ideas are, the multiplied appearance of which constitutes the world of individual things. Therefore music is by no means like the other arts, namely a copy of the Ideas, but a copy of the will itself, the objectivity of which are the Ideas. (Schopenhauer quoted in Gallope, 40)

Deep Refrains returns consistently to what Gallope names “Schopenhauer’s paradox” as his philosophers wrestle with the apparent immediacy with which certain musical forms communicate (Gallope, 32). And this paradox also draws in considerations from Henri Lefebvre, Friedrich Nietzsche, Friedrich Hegel, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Roland Barthes, Henri Bergson, and others (Gallope: 32; 41; 81; 160; 165; 172). Gallope discovers Schopenhauer’s paradox sounding like a refrain throughout the works of these thinkers’ considerations of music.

It [music] has an undecidable, vague ontology that leaves it stuck in a strange place between systematic abstraction and sensuous immediacy, at once an exceptionally malleable object of contemplation and a befuddling trigger of speculative thought. (Gallope, 53)

In fact, discussions about music, philosophy, and the ineffable invoke multiple refrains. Another question Gallope tracks through his five philosophers’ concerns is, as he puts it, ethics.

In ethical terms, how does one do it well? (Gallope, 91)

By “it”, Gallope means musical composition. He follows his philosophers through their suggestions and prescriptions concerning the question of how people should create music and interact with its ineffability. The “Conclusion” of Deep Refrains provides a useful summary of much of the more in depth work Gallope does across four chapters.

Bloch’s tone emphasizes the ineffable substance of music in general; for Bloch, its nonsemantic but still concrete and material blankness harbors exceptional potential to disrupt the orders of reified life. Among an array of examples, his ethics engages historically nonsynchronous musical techniques in nineteenth- century compositions …. Adorno extends the utopian ineffability of Bloch’s tone, but takes much more seriously how music is historically structured by a reified, rationalized, language-like syntax. Via the negative method of immanent critique, Adorno’s ethics correspondingly specifies the narrower, more counterideological techniques of musical resistance. Jankelevitch, like Bloch and Adorno, focuses a substantial amount of his attention on music’s ineffability. Unlike the German philosophers, however, Jankelevitch rejects the idea that music is language-like, and turns instead to the axis of music’s temporal inconsistency in order to draw our ears to a wider multiplicity of its nonsignifying dimensions. Finally, Deleuze and Guattari, in conceiving of music’s sensory immediacy and formal exactitude as structurally coextensive, overturn the question of the ineffable altogether. They downplay any strong exceptionalism for music, and give sound a quiet but vivid specificity that takes its place in an intermedial play among the various arts. (Gallope, 245)

So where does Gallope fall across these ethical philosophical leanings? What are his ethical priorities with regard to musical composition? This can be teased out by attending to what Gallope calls the paradox of the vernacular, which he extrapolates using Adorno’s interpretations of the compositions of Gustav Mahler. In this paradox, 44

Adorno is constantly frustrated by a puzzle: does Mahler’s unabashed use of popular musical structures and folk music themes make him resistant to ideology, or awash in it?

As Adorno’s Mahler study demonstrates, vernacular means do not make for well- defined unities of formal resistance. They can entail empathy, sentimentality, biographical criticism, murkiness, ineffability, multiplicity, and vague criteria. It is difficult to discern their exact relation to ideology. (Gallope, 157)

Something about folk music frustrates Adorno’s ideas about the strict formalism of any genuine counter-ideological material or activity. Folk music makes Adorno contradict himself. The intrigue of this puzzle increases as Gallope detects crucial questions of resistance and musical formalism at play in the philosophies of all the thinkers he studies, even though each falls short of attending to vernacular music with any charity.

Though they were occasionally interested in the problem of vernacular creativity, none thought popular music was of particular value to philosophy …. (Gallope, 8)

But Gallope does not stop where these philosophers do. He modernizes the paradox of vernacular resistance, and updates considerations of form and rejections of form for a contemporary musical world with ever-increasing in-home studios and independent internet record labels and always multiplying musical syncretisms.

In the modern paradox of the vernacular, resistance and creativity comes not from the fragmentation of established musical techniques, but instead from a peripheral space that operates at a remove from the legitimating order of centralized institutions. A vernacular music may unpredictably affirm and reject what is taken by institutions to count as musical form, and because of the vernacular origin of the challenge, a normative formalism may not know and understand the rules at play. (Gallope, 11-12)

Whereas some would hold that, today, all music has escaped its formalisms into a diaspora of popular production, Gallope suggests that even the contemporary vernacular does not “resist without form” (Gallope, 257). And as before, encountering a paradox should seldom signal a block. Whereas the paradox of the ineffable that begins Deep Refrains refers to music as an impetus to philosophize about mediation, the 45 paradox of the vernacular has become the modern incitement to create music. This dissertation engages with the challenge posed by Gallope of considering contemporary musical events and their ineffabilities as proliferating multiplicities that spur people on to thought and other forms of creativity.

Reading dance music events with these six themes elicits some of the conversations that churn in dance music events and elsewhere. These themes connect dance music events to interdisciplinary scholarship: philosophy of music, art criticism, media theory, cultural studies, anthropology, and intellectual histories, not to mention religious studies. All of these fields demonstrate awareness of dance music events without dedicating many rigorous investigative or theoretical resources to their study. Nonetheless, dance music events persist as a common conversation point between these different disciplines, just as the reading themes drawn from these texts are the conversation points for writings and interviews about dance music events. Hopefully, readers will encounter familiar conversations, understandings, questions, opinions, or imaginations across each of their respective familiarities with dance music events.

Movement 1: Field Survey of Writings about Dance Music Events

You try going to a rave as a spectator and see what happens. Douglas Rushkoff in Rave Culture and Religion 2004, xiii

1.1 Overview

Dance music events impress themselves upon writers. Public intellectuals, novelists, critics, journalists, historians, scholars, poets, and others engage with these events on the page. A great deal of literature exists about dance music events in many different cities in the US and globally, but little has been written about dance music events in the Twin Cities.3 So in order to contextualize some of the relationships between dance music events in the Twin Cities and dance music events in general and the deservedness of scholarly attention to the former, this movement surveys writings about dance music events. The survey studies historical, sociotheoretical, popular, and experimental writings to sample the many different types of dance music events that might catch a writer’s attention. The writings surveyed are sited in London, Sydney, Anjuna, Detroit, Toronto, Berlin and elsewhere, and they draw musical, economic, and historical connections among these sites and others. This survey has greater ambitions than to gesture towards fluency by listing off writings. It does not brush over material because it does not assume readers are familiar with the writings surveyed. With a relatively openended, unspecified readership in mind, this survey highlights block quotes from writings that speak their own evidence and engage in conversations with each other. Readers will encounter the main arguments and priorities of every writing in addition to the writing’s engagement with the six reading themes. In this sense, the survey is exploratory more than critical; it does not set out to review the literature so much as to become familiar with it. The goal is to

3 City Pages, a Minneapolis alt-weekly music magazine, shuts down in October 2020. But for more than forty years it is a cutting edge resource for music and event criticism. 47 provide readers materials with which to work, to allow readers to discover some of their own relations between writings. In this sense it is not a survey of a discipline, for example, of “Electronic Dance Music Cultural Studies”. This survey will review academic engagements with dance music events, but also popular histories, artist memoirs, fictions, and social commentaries. This survey will prioritize a demonstration of the abundance of writings about dance music events over the reduction of these writings to any primary fields, calcified theoretical orientations, or conclusive theses. A variety of genres of writing illustrate a field made up of several sites of conversation; this field is not grounded by a canon or a conference or any academic institution. It is grounded in written engagements with dance music events. The writings surveyed in this movement participate in multiple intertextual conversations found in a great deal of writings about dance music events. This dissertation tracks six of these conversations with its six reading themes: events, materiality of sound, critique, darkness, dancing, and ineffability. These distinct conversations intersect and overlap in several notable ways. The survey sets out to present writings so that readers may access these implied intertextual conversations. Six different groupings of writings about dance music events occupy this survey: histories, socio-cultural theories, memoirs, musical non-fiction, fiction, and zines. Each writing to be surveyed will now benefit from a brief introduction before readers dive in deeper. To kick things off, this survey reads five histories. Simon Reynolds’ Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture, published in 1998 and again in an updated second edition in 2012, is an oft-referenced book across academic and popular dance music texts alike. It spends most of its time in the US, the UK, and Germany tracing the contours of several genres and subgenres of dance music events to study the lead-up to and the reverberations of one particular historical event: hardcore rave. Energy Flash presents personal narratives, music writing, quotes from interviews, and historical details about dance music events ranging from the early 1970s to 2012. Michaelangelo Matos’ The Underground is Massive: How Electronic Dance Music Conquered America, published in 2015, illustrates the growth of electronic dance 48 music in the US beginning in the 1980s. The book encompasses the roles of record stores, music labels, radio stations, fashion trends, and drug scenes, and it relates these factors to the varying successes of popular music artists, collectives, albums, and tracks. These relationships are woven together using quotes from interviews, excerpted publications, historical details, and modest personal narratives. The Underground is Massive tells a story. Carleton Gholz’s 2011 dissertation “Where the Mix is Perfect”: Voices from the Post-Motown Soundscape provides an oral history of a little-documented era in Detroit. It follows a number of DJs and performance techniques as they rise out of the disco death of Motown. He takes readers on drives around Detroit, to parties, and to intimate exchanges with his interlocutors to develop a “new urban imaginary for Detroit” in resistance to predominant and popular narratives of a city desolated by postindustrial urban decay. This new urban imaginary places hope in the continuous mixing of records and sounds, people, neighborhoods, and economies. Felix Denk and Sven von Thülen’s Der Klang Der Familie: Berlin, Techno and the Fall of the Wall (2012, translated from the original German into English in 2014) provides historical context for contemporary dance music events in Berlin, Germany which – at the time of the book’s publishing and still today in 2021 – maintain a global reputation. This writing anchors the international mystique that permeates Berlin’s clubs and dance music events in the disused industrial buildings scattered along a zone of territorial confusion that is the western side of the Berlin Wall in the late 1980s. Squatters who inhabit those buildings describe in Der Klang der Familie the promise they initially perceive and the magic they eventually witness as word spreads and an international cast is drawn to dance at the juncture between worlds passing away and worlds approaching. Denk and von Thülen are mostly absent from the writing; Der Klang der Familie tells stories in the voices of those stories protagonists. With the exception of a modest three-page “Preface”, the entire book is made up of interview material in conversation with itself. Because they agree on the relevance of many specific dance music events, interlocutor voices blend together and become conversations about what all happens with dance music events in Berlin during the 1980s and the 1990s. 49

This dissertation is interested in Der Klang Der Familie specifically because the musical traditions and dance music event formats beloved during the 1980s and 1990s in Berlin are close relatives of musical traditions and dance music event formats currently beloved in the Twin Cities. Techno and house are the most common types of music to be found at the events studied in this dissertation. The centrality of house and techno to all four histories studied in this movement indicates that dance music events in the Twin Cities are caught up in musical traditions and charismatic precedents that are not only local. The next conversational milieu of writings about dance music events – sociotheoretical works – relies on narratives that elaborate the 20th Century development and distribution of recording technologies, the global economic legacy of 1960s American countercultures, and New Age spirituality. But here history serves a purpose; these writings pursue the interpretation of dance music events in their social functions and significations. In Arun Saldanha’s Psychedelic White: Goa Trance and the Viscosity of Race, dance music events in the Indian town Anjuna are sites for the analysis of global socioeconomic trends. Psychedelic White is an ethnography that proves capitalist oppression and white ethnocentrism are alive and well at Anjuna’s picturesque oceanside dance music events. This writing performs a double critique; on the one hand it counters ideas about the resolutely discursive nature of race in the academy, and on the other hand it counters unfounded optimisms regarding racial politics of dance music events. Saldanha creates six concepts that emphasize the materiality of social relations and the embodiment of identity to decode racial dynamics on Goan dance floors. Saldanha’s hopeful conclusion is that the material embodiment of white modernity, not its discursivity, is the key to its vulnerability. Psychedelic White is in conversation with the theoretical pursuits of Graham St. John, whose work Technomad: Global Raving Countercultures highlights accounts from a wide variety of international events that consistently reaffirm the very post-racial and utopian reputations of dance music events that Saldanha complicates. St. John remixes the carnivalesque, a hermeneutic device developed by literary historian Mikhail Bakhtin, to describe the unifying power of widespread contemporary festive forms of resistance. 50

Technomad studies interview material, popular histories, peer reviewed scholarship, and more. Sarah Thornton’s Club Cultures: Music, Media and Subcultural Capital is skeptical regarding suggestions of the transgressive potential of dance music events. It invokes Jean Baudrillard to show that dance music events are permeated by hierarchical economies of taste. For Club Cultures, economies of taste are pernicious precisely because they obscure their own hierarchies, so it takes both subcultural participants and theorists to task for flattening subcultural structures. Club Cultures is based primarily on Thornton’s own experiences as a researcher at events. It works with her field notes, interviews, and close readings of the alternative media to unearth subcultural narratives, reflections, and hierarchies. Maria Pini’s Club Culture and Female Subjectivity: The Journey from Home to House pushes back directly against McRobbie and Thornton, concluding that dance music events are privileged sites for experimentation with new modes of female subjectivities. This writing introduces all of its interlocutors, women who participate in dance music events for a variety of reasons and in a variety of ways. By interweaving her interview material with the work of Donna Haraway and Rosi Braidotti, Pini presents a case for the personalized DIY (Do-It-Yourself) fictions available to women at dance music events. Luis-Manuel Garcia’s dissertation “Can You Feel It Too?”: Intimacy and Affect at Electronic Dance Music Events In Paris, Chicago, and Berlin comes to similar, albeit perhaps queered, conclusions. It suggests that dance music events are characterized by intimacy between strangers, and that music, dancing, and altered states contribute to the possibilities of intimate social relations. The primary material in “Can You Feel It Too?” is ethnography complemented by interview excerpts, but this writing also incorporates the ritual theories of Emile Durkheim, Sigmund Freud, Catherine Bell, and Victor Turner; Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir’s, and Emmanuel Levinas’ meditations on touch; and machinic Deleuzian bodies. All this work clarifies and enriches the ethnographic anecdotes while exploring literature relevant to the study of dance music events. 51

Musicians themselves write about dance music events informed by experiences travelling, performing, making mistakes, and receiving feedback from consumers, fellow artists, and businesspeople. This movement surveys Jace Clayton’s memoir Uproot: Travels in 21st-Century Music and Digital Culture. From the perspective of an international touring DJ since 2000, Uproot details Clayton’s experiences performing in more than thirty countries. It offers reflections on music industries global and local, modern technological developments, the social functions of music, and the philosophical provocations of dance music events. Readers gain an intimate look at the professional relations running through many dance music events, as well as an appreciation for music economies as global networks connected by global flows of capital. But by balancing informed cynicism with hopeful anecdotes, Uproot convinces readers to acknowledge the difficulty of reducing musical relations – even those made possible by global flows of capital – to economic relations. Dance music events impress themselves upon writers. And yet, those impressions are not always easily transmuted into recognizable types of literature such as the history, the analysis, or the memoir. Sometimes textual expressions take less recognizable shapes; sometimes they take shape not according to the rules of composition so much as, say, in the spirit of dance music events that inspired them. This dissertation surveys two examples of musical non-fiction. Kodwo Eshun’s More Brilliant than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction is a blend of close listening and music writing; album art interpretation; and the generation of new musical, racial, and political concepts. It achieves this by mixing poststructuralists like Paul Virilio and Gilles Deleuze with musicians like Jeff Mills and Wu Tang Clan. More Brilliant than the Sun considers jazz, disco, funk, and techno in relation to the machines of their production, which sometimes are people and sometimes are technologies. Sometimes, however, the music seems to create itself. This writing interrelates different music and concepts not on the basis of their mutual historical imbrications, but rather because they are related in ways that exceed people’s experiences. DJ Spooky – also known as Paul Miller – is a touring musician and a member of the European Graduate School. This movement surveys his work Rhythm Science, 52 published in 2004. Rhythm Science is a flow: a blend of lucid insights, trippy meditations, cutting critiques, and poetic indulgences. It is not a memoir but it incorporates anecdotes and is written in first person. It is not a philosophical work but it does systematically question precedents in academic and popular thinking. And Rhythm Science includes a mix CD recorded by DJ Spooky himself, giving readers the option of a multimedia reading experience. More Brilliant than the Sun and Rhythm Science testify to the inspirational quality of dance music events, to the potential they bear to trigger writing projects that would, in turn, participate in the same musical, experimental worlds as the events themselves. They are peculiar texts; they explore, without blazing paths, the territories opened up by dance music events. Zines have long been a component of dance music events and of local artist communities more generally. The Twin Cities are no exception; local zines with poems, prints, information, and motivational manifestos are common across grassroots and DIY art economies. Destroyed Apples Magazine is one such publication that spotlights dance music events in the Cities. It shares interviews with local artists and promoters, essays stern and funny, and music. Each issue includes a few tracks. This movement surveys Destroyed Apples Magazine to discover writings about dance music events in the Twin Cities, and to connect writings about dance music events to dance music events in the Twin Cities. Each section concludes with notes about writings that fit the survey categories, but that are not incorporated. These notes signal the excess of writings about dance music events.

1.2: Histories

Nothing you know about the history of music is any help whatsoever. (Eshun 95)

How to begin a historical survey of dance music events, especially considering they have probably been happening since people have been people? The answer is: with humble ambitions. Writing histories of music and musical things can be difficult if readers expect straightforward narratives that prove the always-forward march of time. The histories surveyed in this section are born of their writers’ own experiences at dance music events, so they are born of events comprised of multiple experiences. They are histories couched in memories of those experiences, memories that are tied to individuals and groups but that rarely tell entire stories or even establish definitively reliable resources. Writers of histories that incorporate dance music events take different approaches to the challenge of breaking out of their own stories to share and share in other people’s stories. And their approaches are unilaterally successful, albeit in different manners.

Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture (2012) Simon Reynolds is a writer with multiple books on music and music history.4 But this movement is interested in the second edition of his 1998 Energy Flash and its coverage of London’s hardcore dance music events during the second wave of rave between 1990 and 1992.

Anyone who actually experienced that nineties surge is going to be spiritually scarred for life. The folk memory of that moment … has also affected many who came afterwards and didn’t witness it with their own ears. (Reynolds, 506-507)

Energy Flash contextualizes the spiritual scarring of hardcore dance music events in a history of the music, drugs, people, and events that typified that nineties surge.

4 Blissed Out: The Raptures of Rock (1990) and Shock and Awe: Glam Rock and Its Legacy, from the Seventies to the Twenty-First Century (2016); Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984 (2005); Bring the Noise: 20 Years of Writing about Hip Rock and Hip-Hop (2007). 54

Although hardcore dance music events manifest “in different countries and at different times”, for Reynolds it is most salient in a mass cultural movement in which homemade dance tracks take Britain’s pop charts and clubs by storm, and thousands gather regularly for unlicensed impromptu dance music events (Reynolds, xxiii). And although this category of dance music events is, according to Reynolds, a specifically British phenomenon, the name of the book already implies its international scope; “Energy Flash” is the title of a techno track by a Brooklyn-based artist on a Belgian record label.5

Events [Inspired at] Reynolds is a sucker for hardcore dance music events. They form the inspirational impetus for Energy Flash; for Reynolds, they are where things worthy of history happen. He declares his bias early on, referring to the “partisan zeal” and “unbalanced ardour” that dance music events instill in him (Reynolds, xvii). He plants this zeal’s origins in a “fatally addictive rave-alation” that he experiences while using the empathogenic drug Ecstasy at a dance music event in 1991 (Reynolds, xxii).

This time, fully E’d up [high on Ecstasy], I finally grasped in a visceral sense why the music was made the way it was: how certain tingly textures goosepimpled your skin and particular oscillator-riffs triggered the E-rush [Ecstasy high], the way the gaseous diva vocals mirrored your own gushing emotions. Finally, I understood Ecstasy as a sonic science. And it became even more crystal clear that the audience was the star: that bloke over there doing fishy-finger-dancing was as much a part of the entertainment, the tableau, as the DJs or bands. Dance-moves spread through the crowd like superfast viruses. I was instantly entrained in a new kind of dancing – tics and spasms, twitches and jerks, the agitation of bodies broken down into separate components, then re-integrated at the level of the dancefloor as a whole. Each sub-individual part (a limb, a hand cocked like a pistol) was a cog in a collective ‘desiring machine’, interlocking with the sound-system’s bass-throbs and sequencer-riffs. Unity and self-expression fused in a forcefield of pulsating, undulating euphoria. (Reynolds, xxii)

This passage is typical of Reynolds writing; he shares his dancing experiences with readers periodically throughout Energy Flash and describes his attendance at several events throughout the 1990s. By including detailed descriptions, this writing attempts to transport readers to dance music events so that they can recall their own rave-alations

5 Energy Flash by Joey Beltram on R&S Records, 1990 . 55 and spiritual scars, and so that dance music events can discover themselves in their histories.

Ineffability [Intensity] But what is hardcore rave, exactly? Is it some specific type of event, or the music played at an event, or a type of dancing? Is it all of these things equally? Is it anything else also? The way Reynolds describes hardcore dance music events in the following passage invokes something difficult to say, that he designates by repeatedly using the word intensity.

… along came ‘ardkore: not so much music as a science of inducing and enhancing E-rush. Could you even listen to this music ‘on the natural’, enjoy it in an unaltered state? Well, I did and do, all the time. But whether I’d feel it, viscerally understand it, if my nervous system hadn’t been reprogrammed by MDMA, is another matter. Perhaps you only need to do it once, to get sen-E- tized, and then the music will induce memory-rushes and body-flashbacks. (Reynolds, 131)

Hardcore has something to do with intense rushing that holds all and none of its components to be sacred; music, dancing, individuality, technologies, reclaimed spaces, and all the other openended and multiple ingredients for hardcore are only valuable if they function to increase intensity. Dance music events that are hardcore, therefore, are not about any particular thing or object, genre of music, or style of dance. They are about intensity in all its variations. Reynolds takes readers to another event in 1992 to describe this intensity that defines hardcore dance music events.

On my weakened, sleep-deprived system and empty stomach, the effect is almost instantaneous: I’ve got that walking-on-air, helium-for-blood feeling. Even though the music sounds harsh and distorted because it’s overdriven at top volume through an inadequate PA, I’m swept up in a frenzy of belligerent euphoria. (Reynolds, 139)

Here at Castlemorton, the primacy of intensity becomes clear. Without food or quality sound, attendees discover that there is just one thing to do: get on the vibe. Although Reynolds and his crew only stay at the event for a single night, Castlemorton lasts for 56 an entire week and more than 20,000 people participate. This all pays off for Reynolds who writes a book about it. But this project of increasing crowd intensity using different and multiplying and unfamiliar techniques and technologies does not end so well for everyone. Sound systems are impounded and thirteen promoters are arrested, signaling the spent tolerance of British law enforcement with unapologetic, wanton, amplified intensity. Some music is hardcore, but for Reynolds, the term describes a more general prioritization of inducing and increasing intensity to which music is linked. Hardcore dance music events put artistic expression, spiritual growth, and community to function.

What’s the essence? Not sex or drugs or dance, but any or all of these in so far as they’re about intensity, a heightened sense of here-and-now. (Reynolds, 130)

Dancing [Function] For Reynolds, intensity at hardcore dance music events is connected to the intensity- directed functionalisms of multiple dance music event ingredients. Dancing, one such ingredient, permeates Energy Flash. It is implied in the overarching genre of music (dance music) in which hardcore is an obscure corner. Reynolds does not theorize or historicize dancing; he narrates it, turning to dance to illustrate his ethnographic forays, describing “geometric moves” and “fingers that stab and slice, carving cryptograms in the dawn air” (Reynolds, 118 and 139). Dancing proves the intensity of the hardcore and emplaces it in a natural order.

Dancing with the stars overhead, it’s not hard to succumb to the back-to-Nature romanticism. (Reynolds, 138)

In addition to being functionally directed at intensity, dancing is also the function of music. Throughout Energy Flash, Reynolds rarely studies music in isolation of its effects on people. Music at dance music events is functional; it never exists unto itself. Music at hardcore dance music events is …

… a continuum of stuff that makes dance-floor crowds go mental …. More often than not, these are tracks that weren’t made with artistic intent or any preciousness, tracks knocked out quietly, sometimes made with mercenary 57

motives, to fit into the ruling sound that month on the rave floor. Tracks that pander to the will of the crowd, its hunger for manic drug-noise. (Reynolds, 521- 522)

Dancing, for Reynolds, is functionally directed towards hardcore intensity, and – as the function of music – dancing is also the same as that hardcore intensity. Dancing is whatever happens when Reynolds is swept up in hardcore dance music event intensities.

Materiality of Sound [Immersive feedback loops] Hardcore intensities, as ineffable as they may be for Reynolds, aren’t abstract ideas or ethereal things. They are connected to the chemical reactions triggered by drugs, the adrenaline of dancing, and immersion in a sonic environment. Chemicals, hormones, and vibrations abound at the dance music events described in Energy Flash, and they act through technologies and techniques on other technologies, bodies, and landscapes. In the passage below, Reynolds’ readers taste the materiality of sound in its feedback relationships with Ecstasy.

All music sounds better on E [Ecstasy] – crisper and more distinct, but also engulfing in its immediacy. House and techno sound especially fabulous. The music’s emphasis on texture and timbre enhances the drug’s mildly synaesthetic effects, so that sounds seem to caress the listener’s skin. You feel like you’re dancing inside the music; sound becomes a fluid medium in which you’re immersed. Rave music’s hypnotic beats and sequenced loops also make it perfectly suited to interact with another attribute of Ecstasy; recent research suggests that the drug stimulates the brain’s 1b receptor, which encourages repetitive behavior. (Reynolds, xxxi-xxxii)

For Reynolds, the materiality of sound is the substance in which people’s skin, brains, and behavior at dance music events are immersed. At hardcore dance music events, music, like dancing, is functionally directed at intensity produced in and by the inhabiting of sounds produced by large scale sound systems.

… over the years, rave music has gradually evolved into a self-conscious science of intensifying MDMA’s sensations. ... Today’s house track is a forever- fluctuating, fractal mosaic of glow-pulses and flicker-riffs, a teasing tapestry whose different strands take turns to move in and out of the sonic spotlight. 58

Experienced under the influence of MDMA [Ecstasy], the effect is synaesthetic – like tremulous fingertips tantalizing the back of your neck, or like the simultaneously aural/tactile equivalent of a shimmer. In a sense, Ecstasy turns the entire body-surface into an ear, a ultra-sensitized membrane that responds to certain frequencies. Which is why the more funktionalist, drug-determined forms of rave music are arguably only really ‘understood’ (in a physical, non-intellectual sense) by the drugged, and are only really ‘audible’ on a big club sound-system that realizes the sensurround, immersive potential of the tracks. (Reynolds xxxii)

According to Reynolds, understanding dance music events is difficult without large scale sound systems, without immersive participation. From a condition of immersion synthesizers, speakers, and drugs can be heard as relevant material relations in hardcore dance music events.

Critique [Avant-lumpen] Throughout Energy Flash, Reynolds chats with readers as he develops sensitivities to the political relations of dance music events.

And despite its ostensibly escapist nature, rave has actually politicized me, made me think harder about questions of class, race, gender, technology. (Reynolds, xxvi)

Reynolds does not treat dance music events as mass disappearance, as liminal moments that aim only to deaden or temporarily rejuvenate subjects of the British Empire. Readers recall that dance music events leave scars, and they also teach lessons about social hierarchies and ideas that imprison people. Reynolds describes hardcore’s “avant-lumpen” ethic to readers by juxtaposing hardcore to its estranged sibling, intelligent dance music (Reynolds, 127).

For all its rhetoric of ‘progression’, intelligent techno involved a full-scale retreat from the most radically posthuman and hedonistically funktional aspects of rave music towards more traditional ideas about creativity, namely the auteur theory of the solitary genius who humanizes technology rather than subordinates himself to the drug-tech interface. (Reynolds, 157)

Intelligent dance music is too classical, according to Reynolds. Its raison d'être is no longer intensity at dance music events so much as it is excellent production or home 59 listening. So for Reynolds, intelligent dance music is not adequately critical of the status quo and economic exploitation of musical events. Reynolds encourages readers to be dissatisfied with a slogan coined in 1994 by Mix Master Morris.

‘I Think Therefore I Ambient’ recast progressive rock’s neo-Cartesian split between head and body as the struggle between atmospheric mindfood (ambient) versus thoughtless rhythmic compulsion (hardcore). (Reynolds, 159)

As a music writer, Reynolds perceives little distance between musical and philosophical disagreements; the two domains (music and philosophy) are caught up in each other.

Darkness [Drugs and society] Darkness collects multiple meanings in Energy Flash. First and foremost, Reynolds uses darkness to refer to the dangers of drugs. Amphetamines take tolls, and hardcore dance music events are not exempt from these risks. Addictions, overdoses, psychotic breaks and deaths are a part of dance music events, and Reynolds uses darkness to describe these ominous conditions.

In Ecstasy subcultures too, there tends to be a point where the MDMA honeymoon phase comes to an abrupt end; again and again … the descent into darkness occurs. (Reynolds, 188)

Aside from its use as a historical device, darkness is already in many dance music events. For Reynolds, sometimes darkness is a mimetic representation of aspects of dance music events themselves, regardless of the historical moment of the dance music event.

The truth is that there’s always been a dark side to rave culture; almost from the beginning, the ecstatic experience of dance-and-drugs was shadowed by anxiety. ‘Losing it’ is a blissful release from the prisonhouse of identity, but there comes a point at which the relief of ceding self-consciousness/self-control bleeds into a fear of being controlled (by a demonic Other: the malign logic of the drug/tech interface). Again and again, the moment of endarkenment recurs in rave subcultures; the nihilism latent in its drug-fueled utopianism is always lurking, waiting to be hatched. (Reynolds, 201)

In this passage, darkness is the inhibition of people’s autonomy, which has two sides: release from self and the seizure of control of that self by other malignant forces. These dark ecstasies are characteristic of hardcore dance music events transhistorically. So darkness is simultaneously a historical trajectory of what Reynolds calls Ecstasy subcultures, and also already in many practices that involve the dissolution of selves. Energy Flash participates in a great deal more conversations than those noted by the six reading themes, and it covers prolific ground in memory of hardcore dance music events. But there is always more to say about dance music events.

The Underground is Massive: How Electronic Dance Music Conquered America (2015) Michaelangelo Matos is a music writer with other books on Prince and the year 1984 in pop music culture.6 His ambitions in The Underground is Massive are stated in an “Introduction”: this book is a history of the music Matos loves (Matos, xiii). But it is also the history of what Matos describes as a music culture.

This is a story about a culture forming, taking over every part of the world except its creators’ own—only to rear up and take center stage after mutating into something its inventors barely recognized. It’s also about the people who took it to audiences it hadn’t reached. (Matos, xii)

Matos’ thorough research and perspectives on dance music events in the US and their histories are crucial to this dissertation, and more so because he provides an interview in the second movement. Matos is also an attendee of multiple dance music events in the Twin Cities studied in this dissertation, providing a stabilizing link between writings about dance music events and dance music events in the Twin Cities.

Ineffability [Multiple stories] Writing a history of dance music events in the US proves to be no simple task; the bulk of the text in The Underground is Massive is occupied by quotes from interviews and

6 Sign ‘O’ the Times (2004) and Can’t Slow Down: How 1984 Became Pop’s Blockbuster Year (2020). 61 excerpts mined from published interviews and articles. Matos also takes cues from published histories including Reynolds’ Energy Flash.As a result of there being so much material to cover, Matos confides to readers, the history he writes is not the one he anticipated.

If you’d told me … in 2000 that I’d someday write a history of the music I loved, I’d have raver-hugged you. If you’d added that I’d have to cut both Danny Tenaglia and Josh Wink’s “Higher State of Consciousness” out of it, I’d have shanked you. Yet that’s what it’s come down to here. Tenaglia is one of the dozen greatest DJs I’ve ever heard; he’s done as much to spread house music as anyone alive. He just did it away from the center of the events I’ve focused on. (Matos, xiii)

The Underground is Massive tells several stories. It emphasizes the significant roles of various record stores, music labels, drug scenes, radio stations, and fashion icons. It follows popular artists, albums, tracks, and collectives through their interactions with lesser known media and creatives, keeping an eye all the while on the charts and the shifting dynamics of the business of live music. It is a history, not a theorization, and as such prioritizes detailed description and narration to the ends of the archive. But it is a history of murky, imprecise domains, domains whose histories shift with every contemporary development. These domains are dance music events in the US.

Events [Chapters] Each chapter in The Underground is Massive revolves around a central historical recounting of an event. Sometimes this event is an extra special club night (The Music Institute, Chapter 2), sometimes it is a rave (Grave, Chapter 5), sometimes it is a festival (Detroit Electronic Music Festival, Chapter 13), and sometimes it is a private party (Random Access Memories, Chapter 18). In each case, the title event highlights some of the details or priorities of the chapter and serves as an orienting point around which the other historical events, music, and personalities that surface during the chapter arrange themselves. Although he does not attend any of the events for which the chapters are named, Matos does attend many events covered in the chapters (Matos xiii). This attests to his connectedness, the rigor of his research, and especially to cross-legibility of different 62 dance music events. His is an experientially informed historical writing project that follows amplified samples and electronic beats and rhythms along their American propagations.

Materiality of Sound [Synthesizers] Matos tells the story of Detroit musician Derrick May selling a Roland TR-909 to Frankie Knuckles, another musician based in Chicago, in 1983 (Matos 6).7 Following Matos’ telling, the well-established Knuckles is in search of a TR-909 to incorporate into his DJ setup when the up-and-coming May has an extra for sale. This presents an excellent opportunity for May to make professional contacts and garner influence by sharing access to a musical instrument. There is just one issue. The TR-909 has already made a splash in Detroit in the performances of May’s mentor, Juan Atkins. It is Atkins’ secret weapon. He plays it “underneath the records he was spinning, to keep the groove going and goose it. That way you stood out in a crowded field,” (Matos, 2). If the 909 were to make its way into Knuckles’ performances, Detroit’s claim to “the sound” would be compromised, or at least diluted into a Midwest diaspora. This is exactly what happens.

Derrick went and gave away the fucking sound! (Juan Atkins in Matos, 3).

For Atkins, the sound of dance music is not tied to the machine. For Atkins, via Matos, the sound is the same as the TR-909. And the fact that this is one of the very first stories told in The Underground is Massive suggests to readers the significance of live analogue synthesis to the musical assemblages that produced dance music events which conquer the US. The sound of this music is the sound of the machines that produce it.

Critique [Underground Resistance] One of the broader arcs in The Underground is Massive is the story of two intertwining

7 A TR-909 is a specific drum machine. A drum machine is a synthesizer designed to mimic the sounds of percussion instruments. TR-909s direct electrical currents through effects and amplifiers to create those percussion sounds. They can also play back looped sequences at a consistent tempo. In theory, this allows them to play the role of a drummer. 63 entities relevant to dance music events which Matos loosely labels the majors and the underground. Global industry boardrooms and local groups wrestle throughout the 1990s over copyright laws, especially, but also over contracts, riders, and reputations. Matos recounts a particularly fascinating instance of copyright war between grassroots Detroit label Underground Resistance (UR), on the one side, and Sony Music Germany and BMG (Bertelsmann Music Group) on the other. When UR artist DJ Rolando releases a track titled “Jaguar” in March 1999 to great acclaim, it …

… became UR’s bestseller, and Sony Music Germany asked to license it; [UR cofounder] Mike “Fuck the Majors” Banks said no. So an executive commissioned a trance version by a pair of producers calling themselves Don Jaguar, then advertised it as a “tone-by-tone” “remix-cover”—a plain claim-jump, aimed for the super-club trance market. UR’s spokesperson, Cornelius Harris, quickly issued a communiqué: “We urge all concerned individuals to flood Sony’s offices worldwide with calls, e-mails, and faxes expressing those concerns. This kind of crap has to stop and it has to stop now. Amazingly, it did—Sony dropped the release, which BMG picked right back up, this time crediting Type. So UR cut it off with a “Jaguar” remix EP, featuring, among others, Jeff Mills, and buried the remake. It was a victory for Detroit’s techno cognoscenti …. (Matos, 263-264)

In order to maintain recognition for the authenticity of DJ Rolando’s track in the face of its exploitation for profit by music label corporations, UR releases a remix record in 2000 that aims to invalidate all unsanctioned versions of “Jaguar”. Explicit in the production and liner notes of the record, named Revenge of the Jaguar, is an critique of the market opportunism displayed by Sony and BMG. The artists on Revenge of the Jaguar make clear their feelings concerning the exploitation of DJ Rolando’s music through storytelling in the liner notes from Revenge of the Jaguar, excerpted here in full.

Centuries ago, before the coming of the conquerors, the Aztec Mystics ruled an empire larger than what is now known as Mexico. The symbol of their power was the Jaguar, the powerful creature that stalked the jungles just outside of their monumental cities. In today’s world, the Aztec civilization lies in ruins. Their temples and tombs have been desecrated and their power animal, the Jaguar, has almost been hunted to extinction. Despite the encroachment of Western civilization, untold power and awareness yet lie within these ruins and the spirit of the Jaguar. To desecrate these ruins and this spirit would be harmful to modern man. For these are things that are beyond the perception of modern world. Legends 64

foretold of the greatest of the Aztec Mystics vowing vengeance on anyone who violated their temples and totems. This warrior society used their most powerful totem as their symbol. They were known as the Knights of the Jaguar. Even now in the new millennium, the long dead Jaguar Knights can sense the violation of their symbols and spirits. Using the Jaguar as their spirit guide to travel through the realms of Death itself, they can stalk their prey through time and exact their ultimate vengeance. (Vinyl liner notes from UR-2000, Revenge of the Jaguar)8

In this musical mythology, the majors are Western civilization encroaching on the authenticity of the underground’s Aztec totem. The artists threaten that as the music business hunts “Jaguar” closer to extinction, powers beyond human comprehension take corporations as their own prey. This narrative demonstrates a tension inherent in many of the dance music events that Matos catalogues.

One defining dichotomy of dance music is that it is, by definition, populist—and that many of its most ardent fans are anything but. (Matos, xiv)

Dance music events incorporate confrontations across different levels of social hierarchies in the US. Some of these confrontations result in the imbedding of critiques of economic exploitation within music made for populist dance music events.

Dancing [Two entities together] In The Underground is Massive, the majors and the underground have more successful interactions than those between BMG and UR. Daft Punk, a duo of musicians based in France, play a notable role in some of the rosier relations. The final chapter of The Underground is Massive bears the name of the afterparty for Daft Punk’s 2014 Album of the Year Grammys win: “Random Access Memories”. Taking place at the Plaza Hotel in Los Angeles, the event features a “DJ booth suspended three stories high”, a floor with moving LED lights, and a star-studded lineup of performing musicians handpicked by Daft Punk (Matos, 381). Some big names are in attendance, including Questlove, Beyoncé, Robyn, Giorgio Moroder, and Lars Ulrich, all of whom carry significant notoriety in multiple distinct musical domains (Matos, 380-381). But “the ghosts” of the

8 https://www.discogs.com/DJ-Rolando-aka-The-Aztec-Mystic-Revenge-Of-The-Jaguar-The-Mixes/release/4080 also add links to tracks 65 dance music scene are also present; for example, Matos follows Woody McBride for a few steps, a Minneapolis artist and promoter who booked Daft Punk for their first performance in the US in 1996 (Matos, 380). Matos quotes Jake Shears from Seattle to describe the mixed and mixing dance floor.

This was a party. “No one had their guard up,” says Shears. “The dance floor was crazy. Everyone was really letting loose.” (Matos, 381)

Readers may ask, what is the significance to this dissertation of these people dancing together in these circumstances, especially in the shadow of as aesthetically opaque and corrupt an institution as the Grammys? Matos also considers this question.

One party isn’t the world—though some are so great they can make you believe it could be. But a party can be a beginning. The Grammys aren’t so good at being the world, either—but their distance from the cutting edge signals when something is acceptable to the music business, whatever form it takes. Dancing till four in the morning on a psychedelic floor at a party for two men who’d heard the future in house and techno music played in warehouses, the dance-music underground and the big music biz, entities that had circled one another for a generation, finally embraced and said: Welcome to the machine. (Matos, 382)

For Matos, dancing is the mutual participation of the majors and the underground in some kind of greater machine. The underground and the majors dance, and in this dance, each discovers the other in some of their own selves.

Darkness [Endarkening] Matos quotes musician Moby in a description of what Reynolds, in Energy Flash, calls the “endarkening” of dance music events, but here it refers to conditions in New York City rather than London.

NASA was where I watched it go from idyllic to quite dark. It went from, in ’92-’93, people taking ecstasy, throwing their hands up in the air, and dancing until six o’clock in the morning, to ’94, when it was definitely very dark. It became seventeen-year-old kids sitting on the floor in K-holes. (Moby in Matos, 145)9

9 A K-hole is a state of dissociative psychedelia effected by Ketamine. 66

Matos reaffirms the drugs-darkness relationship introduced by Reynolds, and the timeline Moby describes for dance music events in New York City also matches that put forth by Reynolds with regard to darkness and dance music events in London. Moby, Matos, and Reynolds agree on the historical relationship between high points in group ecstasy and ensuant darkness. In moments such as this, in which artist perspectives and historical precedents coincide, The Underground is Massive succeeds in its goal to add voices to this history of dance music events in the US.

“Where the Mix is Perfect”: Voices from the Post-Motown Soundscape (2011) Carleton Gholz is a sound archivist. In 2012 he founded the Detroit Sound Conservancy with a group of other board members. According to their website, the Conservancy initially …

… came together because a group … were alarmed by the collective loss of creative voices, musical recordings, and cultural spaces in Detroit. Eventually, we established our vision to create programs and provide leadership in the preservation of musical heritage in a spirit of solidarity and celebration. (From Detroit Sound Conservancy website)10

But before he becomes the Executive Director of a sound archive, Gholz defends a dissertation at the University of Pittsburgh. “Where the Mix is Perfect” makes the case for an updated urban imaginary for Detroit by introducing a queered music archive that counters popular images of a dark, de-industrial era in Detroit’s history by focusing on examples of the city’s success as a creative and cultural powerhouse during the second half of the 20th Century.

Darkness [Image of Detroit] According to “Where the Mix is Perfect”, Detroit suffers from an unfortunate mischaracterization rooted in popular obsessions with its darkness. Multiple representations of the city capitalize on “the spectacle of decay, the monotony of the factory, the darkness of the club” (Gholz, 2). But Gholz holds that these images are not

10 http://detroitsound.org/about/ [formatting] 67 the only significant snapshots from Detroit since Motown and Ford and white homeowners skipped town. The widespread availability of empty buildings sets the stage for vibrant DIY event circuits where people experiment with repurposed technologies and immersive sound. Dancing in the darkness becomes generative.

…this emergent [dance music event] scene had to generate much of its own sonic infrastructure—including sound systems, promotions, record stores, record labels, and management—and remix Detroit’s dark, spectral, de-industrial, murderous image as it manifested itself in the minds of locals and non-locals alike to its uses. (Gholz, 222-223)

For Gholz, a popular understanding of the dark horror of Detroit is only ever a starting point; it is the challenge issued to the Motor City’s dance music event histories that he archives.

Materiality [Soundscape] Joining Voegelin, one of the concepts Gholz introduces helps readers to understand sound as something of an environment. A soundscape is the broad relational and concrete infrastructure in which people hear things, by which people are able to hear.

Like a landscape, a soundscape is simultaneously a physical environment and a way of perceiving that environment; it is both a world and a culture constructed to make sense of that world …. (Gholz, 22)

Soundscapes designate social and infrastructural conditions involved in the sounds people hear. For Gholz, sound is inextricably caught up in a horizon of conditions that ranges from the accessibility of music technologies to musical norms to local ordinances about evening cut-off times for amplified sound. Sound is not limited to that which issues from an instrument. In “Where the Mix is Perfect”, the materiality of sound is soundscapes, entire surrounds, environments people inhabit. The soundscape is therefore key to understanding and appreciating Detroit’s music and dance music events, but also to writing history more generally.

Ineffability [Mix] Another major preoccupation of “Where the Mix is Perfect” is Detroit’s contributions to the history of a musical technique that consists of performing a “continuous mixing of prerecorded music”, or “mixing” for short (Gholz, 87). Gholz uses specific terms in his chapter titles that refer to this technique: “Blend” (Chapter 3), “Mix” (Chapter 4), “Remix” (Chapter 5), and “Sync” (Chapter 6). According to Gholz, these terms hold specific technical meanings regarding DJing, but they also hold meaning related to the structure and desired effects of his dissertation.

… these terms refocus attention away from a reductive understanding of the relationship between economics and music towards an ethic of listening to the mix—and importantly listening to those caught up in that mix. (Gholz, 29)

Gholz writes history as a mix; rather than mixing records, he mixes interview material with ethnography and media studies to render a presentation of blending, openended soundscapes folding into each other over time in Detroit. There is always more relevant material than historians can consider, but the material Gholz highlights throughout his mix consistently points to this very excess, this multiplicity of histories and relevant historical events and conditions. Gholz’s is a mix that leaves readers awash in a balanced blend of voices, music, machines, and their harmonics. Of course, mixing figures conspicuously into the title of the writing. “Where the Mix is Perfect” is a reference to Todd’s Sway Lounge, a gay nightclub that opens in Detroit in 1970. Todd’s achieves a steady following during the 1980s as Detroit’s party circuits blossom. And at Todd’s, adults seeking out progressive music intermingle with drum machine-savvy teenagers (Gholz, 132). “Todd’s was a heady mix of underground style and culture” that pulls from “every social class and ethnicity”, not to mention it is a clothing outlet (Gholz: 133, 134, 135). Todd’s is also only a single component in a mix of events, only a part of a circuit of other clubs like Rich and Famous, The Shelter, The City Club, Asylum, Backstreet, Menjo’s, the Alcove and many more. But that being hedged, for Gholz, Todd’s is a special place. It is typical of the new precedent for nonstop musical immersion by the continuous 69 mixing of records in Detroit’s clubs. And this precedent is, according to Gholz, noteworthy.

… the continuous mix of music in clubs in the 1970s brought together performer and audience—DJ and dancer—into sync in a way that they had not been before. (Gholz, 29)

This mixing of overflowing media into immersive experiences, and this syncing up of DJ and dancer, presages a dance music event format that, according to Gholz, is soon to explode outward from Detroit and across the entire globe.

Dancing [Jeff Mills] Jeff Mills is an international touring musician from Detroit who gets his start as a radio DJ there in the late 1980s before cofounding the label and collective Underground Resistance. In an interview with Gholz, Mills zooms in on the relationship between dancing and music at dance music events.11 He is worth quoting at length.

When people are dancing and you can clearly see that there is a certain type of art that’s going behind what they’re doing with their body to the music .… The DJ or the producer while watching it – you have to assume that the people are adjusting to it so well that they are beginning to relate to it [music] physically and that you have to also assume that at some point they are going to feel so comfortable moving that they are going to modify what they are doing to modify their body to the music and that is what you’re looking for if you’re a DJ, if you are a producer, that’s the stuff you’re looking for, you’re looking for the talkback from the music that you made or the music that you’re playing and that gives you information of what to do next. When the people stop dancing you lose a large part of that communication. If they’re just standing there and they’re putting their hand in the air like they do now with hip-hop – and a lot of techno parties for one reason or another – the DJ can’t see very clearly how the people are really reacting to it, if you can’t see the legs move. It’s that language that’s been created for many, many, years that seems to be slowly dissolving away. Of course, producers will begin to make music that will only get the hands up in the air and not necessarily make the people move because that’s the information that he’s getting. It’s a two-way street and it’s all connected. (Jeff Mills in Gholz, 214- 215).

11 Jeff Mills is, among other hats, a cofounder of UR and one of the artists featured on Revenge of the Jaguar. 70

Mills’ account describes an ideal relationship between DJ and dancers as a cooperative effort, as a collaborative project that explores movements and music as they call to each other at dance music events. For Mills via Gholz, dancers and DJs both are artists, and they interact in their respective creative outputs. Dancers are as necessary for dance music events as musicians, and neither is the whole point because neither makes sense without the other. This is an account of mixing not only as the imperceptible blend of multiple distinct sounds, but as the imperceptible blend of two distinct creative practices: dancing and playing music.

Events [Voom] In recounting and archiving this history of mixed music in Detroit, Gholz swings by several significant dance music events. Voom, a series of events that ran from 1992- 1993, in particular, is paradigmatic of the intertwining trajectories of several distinct communities.

Voom … through its flyers, crossover crowds, and successful progeny, the likes of which would eventually throw raves for thousands in abandoned car factories, seems to present a representative anecdote for a transitional period in which new, whiter, suburban audiences for underground electronic music and culture were crossing urban borders in[to] Detroit. Voom played its part as a midwife for this new scene at the same time that it offered an evolving critique to their audience, a critique that took shape through the process of producing its parties. The flyers, and the stories told about them, provide a way of thinking about that process. (Gholz, 166)

Gholz uses Voom to elaborate sociocultural, infrastructural, and ideological dynamics that were crucial to Detroit’s soundscape during the middle of the 1990s. He elaborates the paths of several promoters and musicians who help to promote and host Voom events, and he also notes the economic dynamics of an underground nightlife economy that was vibrant throughout the 1980s and 1990s in Detroit. Many notable musicians perform at Voom events, and many future event promoters are inspired by their experiences there.

Critique [Paris ‘68] Over the course of “Where the Mix is Perfect” Gholz takes on multiple critical historical tasks. He “queers the archive” by enshrining Ken Collier, a local DJ hero who popularized the continuous mix in Detroit, in the honored legacy of Detroit dance music. And he writes about joining up as a DJ himself with the American Federation of Musicians, Local #5. He also describes his experiences of DJing in Detroit with a colleague as a duo named Paris ‘68, and he elaborates on the critical inflection of their musical projects.

Paris ’68, like our chosen DJ names (he called himself noscene while I called myself nosoul), in true Situationist fashion, reflected an attempt to disturb scene boredom as well as critique too-easy assumptions about what kind of music could be mixed together. (Gholz, 27)

Gholz’s DJ moniker nods to the critical social philosophies of Guy Debord and the French Situationists that light fires under so many French people during the 1960s. For Gholz, an aesthetics of critique is consonant with mixing techniques and the dance music events that they typify. Gholz joins Matos in arguing that dance music events in Detroit cultivate a vibrant strain of this aesthetics of critique.

Der Klang Der Familie: Berlin, Techno and the Fall of the Wall (2014)

UWE REINEKE Turn the door handle, and you were suddenly stadning in a 1,000 square meter [10,760 square foot] space. And every place you opened, you could throw a party. (Denk and von Thülen 81)

The three histories studied so far focus on dance music events in Britain, the US, and Detroit, but they repeatedly visit Berlin, Germany. Each history notes a particular coherence between the techno and house music and events popular in Berlin and in the Upper Midwest in the US (specifically Detroit and Chicago) during the 1980s and 1990s. In the brief preface to Felix Denk and Sven von Thülen’s Der Klang der Familie: Berlin, 72

Techno and the Fall of the Wall, the authors extrapolate on this intercontinental coherence.12

Techno became the soundtrack of reunification-era Berlin for three main reasons: the pure kinetic energy of the new sounds, the magic of the places it was played and the promise of freedom it contained. … The human disappeared in the tracks; the artist subject dissolved in the circuitry of the drum machine, the binary codes of the sampler and the every-changing project names of the producers. At the beginning, even the DJ was a part of the party, not its focus or star. The star was the party itself and with it, all the abandoned, decaying venues transformed into dance floors, sometimes for a night, sometimes long enough that people from around the world could come dance on them. (9-10)

Der Klang Der Familie recounts stories of techno and house focused dance music events developing in Berlin from the small-scale and niche projects of adventurous squatters to a mass entertainment industry. And it does so by extending Gholz’s technique of writing-as-mix by telling these stories exclusively in the voices of sixty-nine different interlocutors. The result is a historical mix of many different but coherent historical narratives from many different types of people.

At the early techno parties, breakdancers from Alexanderplatz, football hooligans, former East German punks and radio junkies encountered a West Berlin conglomerate of Schöneberg gays, Kreuzberg squatters, students, artists, English soldiers on furlough and American expats in Berlin for the cheap rents. (Denk and von Thülen, 10)

Events [Fall of the wall] German Reunification and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 is a recurring topic throughout this writing, and it is a topic that focuses a conversation in the first period covered in the book, entitled “Probably the most important night in history”. By collecting and putting into conversation a series of interlocutor accounts of experiences of this historic event, Der Klang der Familie presents the fall of the Wall as a series of events. On the Friday after the Thursday when deconstruction of the wall begins, an East

12 “Der Klang der Familie” translates to “the sound of the family”. It is the title of a track created in 1992 by two of the book’s interlocutors, Dr. Motte and 3Phase . 73

Berliner interlocutor goes to check out a West Berlin club called Ufo that he finds refreshingly peaceful.

WOLLE XDP People were dancing like on The Muppet Show, apparently unconcerned with how they looked. And you didn’t have to be afraid of getting smacked in the face. (Denk and von Thülen, 56)

Sven and von Thülen also catalog a surprising number of cynical reactions to the fall of the wall. A punk, also from the east, offers a much more skeptical account of his memory of the event.

JOHNNIE STIELER “I wasn’t so incredibly happy about it. The Wall opened, and we could go over from the East. But since West Berlin was such an unbelievably narrow-minded and stuffy city with unbelievably narrow-minded and stuffy West Berliners, it wasn’t so thrilling. (Denk and von Thülen, 57)

The events of German Reunification are tied, in conversations throughout all three periods covered in Der Klang der Familie, to the expanding reach of American and Western European economic interests into the receding Soviet Union. And multiple interlocutors join Johnnie Stieler in aligning what they understand as the commercialization of dance music events with what they portray as the victory of capitalism over communism in Germany, and the subsequent spread of the influence of the former. At a later point, a Detroit musician with ties to Berlin offers a different, more poetic consideration of the relationship of the fall of the wall to the musical events that sweet through Berlin.

Robert Hood … It seemed to me that they [Berliners] wanted to escape their past. And we [Detroit musicians] wanted to escape our past, too, the one so full of racism. Escape and move on. Remember the past, but look for a better world. That, I believe, was the common thread. We were all looking to these futuristic, experimental sounds as an escape vehicle, as a spaceship with which to get away, to transport ourselves into the future where we’re all one, where divisions of race and religion and culture are torn down just like the Berlin Wall. (Denk and von Thülen, 155)

For Robert Hood via Denk and von Thülen, Berlin and Detroit are both finding futures at dance music events that distance them from pasts marred by violent political divisions.

Critique [Commercialization] Robert Hood’s poeticism is, however, largely an exception in Der Klang der Familie. Conversations about the fall of the Wall more generally involve critiques of a historical trajectory defined by commercialization. Dance music events begin in Berlin as niche phenomena away from commercial markets organized by groups of friends who had sunk into the in-between infrastructure in deterritorialized East Berlin and areas around the Wall.

CLÉ Taxes and stuff like that simply didn’t matter. We played in clubs that belonged to no one, in parts of town for which no one was responsible, in buildings that, according to the land register, didn’t even exist. We lived predominantly during hours of the day when all normal people were sleeping. Obviously you didn’t think about stuff like that. (Denk and von Thülen, 247)

But eventually, dance music events gain speed in Berlin, and as attendees multiply, bureaucratic structures and economic interests inevitably take heed and integrate themselves.

KATI SCHWIND The scene had outgrown its cuddle corner and become more commercial. People suddenly realized that it wasn’t just a bunch of weirdos here listening to weird music – apparently, you could make money off it. And everyone, as they always do, wanted a piece of the pie, which then also grew rapidly bigger. (Denk and von Thülen, 165)

During the 1990s, dance music events in Berlin develop into an international industry. Today, in 2021, Berlin is one of Earth’s most notorious nightlife capitals. Several more writings throughout this movement check in with Berlin, and multiple interlocutors interviewed in the next movement have connections to Berlin as well. I have attended multiple Twin Cities musicians’ performances at venues historicized in Der Klang der Familie, and connections between Berlin and the Twin Cities abound. But this is not a characteristic specific to the Twin Cities; this is an effect of the power generated at dance music events in Berlin in the 1980s and 1990s. 75

Mike Banks, another Detroit musician who releases music with early Berlin labels, contributes a different critical perspective about commercialization in Berlin.

Mike Banks When the UK [and Europe] discovered techno and house in the late ‘80s, many brothers believed that this “discovery” would help them in the US markets where they were having some moderate “underground” success. … Of course, the artists and DJs benefited financially from the increased demand for their performances across Europe, and some did well as individuals. But the dream of electrifying the inner city with hi-tech, sci-fi thoughts and dreams was negated. (Denk and von Thülen, 153-154)

Banks is frustrated in the inability of European music industries to penetrate the US market, and he is suspicious of their disrespectful intentions to extract value from the US music that they feign to support. Banks does not trust the majors to broadcast his music in ways that he feels are effective towards his ends, or that align with his musical ethics. And he uses the commercialization of US-made dance music in Berlin as the stage for an example of this critique. For Banks, the success of US music in Berlin does not help people in the US. Der Klang der Familie contains multiple refined critiques of the commercialization of dance music events and their materials that are informed by personal experiences, expert knowledge, and intellectual reflections.

Ineffability [Infrastructure] Multiple interlocutors recall that dance music events are adventurous in the early days of German Reunification. Throwing a party is how people explore buildings, and how they express their otherwise ineffable impressions of the abandoned infrastructure in a city trying to raise itself from its own heat death. A state of confusion typifies the ownership of a great deal of properties as all of East Berlin’s infrastructure undergoes a governmental change. Disused utilities buildings like electricity plants and banks offer cracks through which adventurous squatters slip. In the section titled “Temporary Autonomous Zone”, two interlocutors talk about discovering the “e-werk”, an abandoned building that became a popular dance music event location.

KATI SCHWIND We looked around some more and eventually found ourselves in the control center. All the equipment was covered in a thick layer of dust, but you still had the feeling that the men who’d once worked there had only just left. As though they’d had to leave in a rush. Chernobyl wasn’t so long ago, after all. A very special light shone into the room through the windows. Beautiful. JONZON We were speechless. This curved building, all the equipment and transformers. We knew right away we had to throw a party there. It wasn’t a question that it’d be illegal. There was no one in charge anymore. In the East, it was totally unclear what belonged to whom. (Denk and von Thülen, 82)

In Berlin during the late 1980s and early 1990s, the impossible-to-describe feeling of standing in massive modern factory buildings where “everything was just left behind” does not stun everyone into awestruck respect (Denk and von Thülen, 80). Some people it spurs on to throw dance music events in those locations, and ineffability multiplies as hundreds join them to dance.

Dancing [Authentic participation] People celebrate buildings by throwing dance music events, and people celebrate dance music events by dancing. Especially in accounts of early events, several interlocutors recall the participative joy of dancing in places they had never imagined. In the preface, even Denk and von Thülen display enthusiasm for this myth of pure participation themselves, despite the fact that admit they never witness it.

For a while, it seemed as though difference no longer mattered, nor where you came from or what you were wearing. So long as you participated. Everything was focused on the music and the new togetherness on and alongside the dance floor. (Denk and von Thülen, 10)

Further to this point, the writers highlight a DJ’s fond memories of the ideal relationships that existed early on between dancers and DJs. This anecdote also reminisces about the mythic endurance of some dancers.

CLÉ … You could play differently and take people on a journey. They no longer stopped dancing for something as silly as, say, thirst. There was always someone on the dance floor with a drink, and it belonged to everyone. … With house music, some people would come at midnight and dance until noon, always 77

in the same spot, every week. They didn’t want to talk either. Just dance. (Denk and von Thülen, 124)

Dancing, throughout Der Klang der Familie, is consistently associated with original and authentic participation in dance music events.

Darkness [Dark, foreboding Berlin] Darkness is a major theme throughout Der Klang der Familie, taking on several meanings in the voices of several different interlocutors. First, darkness is a property of many abandoned buildings suitable for dance music events. Two of the most notorious, Ufo and Tresor, are even underground. Ufo’s original location is the potato cellar of an apartment building on Köpenicker Straße in West Berlin. One attendee tells the story of his introduction to Ufo.

UWE REINECKE When I was standing in front of it, I was really scared. Everything was dark. … But I got in, acted as though I knew my way around – and walked straight past the hole in the ground that was the entrance. I was standing in an empty room and didn’t know where to go. Sandra [the doorperson] called from behind. “Over there, the hole. You have to go down it.” ... I went down the ladder. It was pitch dark and full of fog. Every now and then, strobe lights flashed across the room. One corner was totally piled up to the ceiling with garbage. (Denk and von Thülen, 33)

Ufo is dark in a very literal sense. Tresor is another dance music event location close to the Wall. It hides in the underground vault of an abandoned bank. The following quote that references the discovery of Tresor’s location adds something to the literal darkness of Ufo.

CLÉ The space was just screaming to be turned into a club. There was something dark about it, forbidden. (Denk and von Thülen, 102)

Detroiter Blake Baxter adds meditations that extend this more-than-literal usage of darkness.

Blake Baxter When I went to Tresor, I was like, “Is this legal?” People are up for abuse, they’re up for this dark thing. Germans are some dark people, man. The 78

art, the style of music. They can be really dark. Detroit is more gray. The darkness was forced upon them, and they just accepted it. I think in Germany, they accept it and look at it as an art. (Denk and von Thülen, 147)

Blake Baxter initiates something of a typology of darkness that is born out in music and dance music events and that connects art to its location. But this typology is vague; it leans on both poetic and literal usages of darkness to place different meanings of darkness, different darknesses, in relation to each other.

Materiality of Sound [Sound systems] Powerful sound systems play crucial roles in Sven and von Thülen’s history of dance music events in Berlin. One DJ remembers the prominent features of the advertising flyer that draws him to his first rave. Terrible Tekknozoid was my first real rave. With that famous flyer: “150 000 watt sound system, 300 000 watt light system, fog, strobe.” … Musically, it was the sound of mines: down the shaft to hammer stones. (Denk and von Thülen, 72)

As dance music events grow in popularity in Berlin, the availability of records suited to continuous mixing increases. More and more music is made specifically for powerful sound systems with immersive low end capacities; vocals are left behind for thudding kick drums. More and more house and techno music spill into Berlin from the US and other places.

Roland 128 BPM The beats were more urgent and the bass more oppressive than anything you’d heard before. The perfect dance music. You could get more completely caught up in the music, let yourself go much more easily. In the Hi- NRG tracks, there was still a lot extraneous going on – singing, instrumentation. But all that was gone now. The focus was on a precise beat. (Denk and von Thülen, 70)

Detroit musician Lawrence Burden discusses the effects of transport induced by travelling overseas to perform and then being recontextualized by powerful sound systems.

LAWRENCE BURDEN I like to hear records loud. So to go to places overseas and feel it and hear it like that, it threw me into another realm. (Denk and von Thülen, 163)

Again, Detroit and Berlin convene around music made for dance music events. In something of a twist, it is often precisely the centering of powerful sound systems that makes early dance music event venues so temporary. Because these venues are not licensed clubs, they are particularly vulnerable to the complaints that continuous loud music is sure to eventually generate. A DJ describes this dynamic at the second Ufo location.

Tanith … And there was always problems with the volume. The building was made of pure concrete, and the ventilation shart whent through the entire high- rise. The neighbors were constantly complaining. (Denk and von Thülen, 61)

The need for more stable homes for high powered sound systems eventually draws enterprising promoters to start licensed clubs. The growing demand for immersive dance music events is, in this way and through the materiality of sound, connected to their history of commercialization in Berlin and globally.

Der Klang der Familie might seem to lack an analytic component in that it only presents interview material. But upon engagement readers realize analytic and historical and other nuanced perspectives are already at play in the interview material itself. Although there are countless parallel, intersecting, and continuing relations between the histories of dance music events in Berlin and the Twin Cities, this dissertation does not seek to establish those relations firmly. This dissertation reads Der Klang der Familie to appreciate the vibrant conversations at play in dance music events. Sometimes, dance music events actively historicize themselves in conversations without the help of authorial voices.

Historical Work Not Considered

This movement cannot hope to attend to all of the histories that proliferate about dance music events, or even all those that are relevant to the Twin Cities. Dan Sicko’s Techno 80

Rebels: The Renegades of Electronic Funk is an example of an important historical text that this movement does not read. Techno Rebels is a tale interlocking of artists, the art that inspired them, and the labels that distributed them. By following these paths of influence, Sicko places the origins of techno firmly in Detroit. Sicko places at center stage a select few individuals as they are defined by a specific geohistorical emplacement, and describes how their activities and creative output reverberate in and are amplified by certain other social-technological contexts, in particular in London, Antwerp, and Berlin. Of course, Sicko allows that this is an origin that like all origins opens into its material connections, and prioritizes music and business relations as these material connections. Sicko’s is not the only history left behind by this movement, but at some point this movement must move beyond the past. 81

1.3 Sociotheoretical Studies

The 1990s witnessed the consolidation of “rave studies” in academia. Saldanha, 273

Over the past decade, club cultures have become the subject of an animated and fast- growing discussion between youth and popular cultural scholars. Pini, 6

Monographs, anthologies and all types of peer-reviewed paraphernalia study dance music events. This is, of course, no surprise, and it is true well beyond the narrow scope of house and techno focused dance music events; hip hop, metal, and orchestral music each probably attracts even greater scholarly attention. It should therefore also come as no surprise that academic journals and presses publish sociotheoretical work on dance music events.

Psychedelic White: Goa Trance and the Viscosity of Race (2007) Arun Saldanha’s Psychedelic White: Goa Trance and the Viscosity of Race studies dance music events in Anjuna, a town in Goa, India legendary for its rave tourism. Saldanha’s theoretical priority is to show that racial tensions and dynamics, and indeed racist relations, pervade dance music events in Anjuna. He sets out “to make sense of racism when it’s not supposed to be there”, most specifically, at psychedelic dance music events (Saldanha, 5). His conclusion discovers that psychedelics bear out race relations; indeed, in opposition to popular myths, psychedelic states are not postracial.

The psychedelic self isn’t at all purified of the social; rather, it seriously plays around with what the environment has to offer. It is the social itself that already contains the possibility of the psychedelic. (Saldanha, 15)

The people at the dance music events Saldanha studies are political subjects informed every day and by their surroundings about their social standing and tourist status, both of which are tied to physical appearances.

There is no “just having fun”, and certainly not for “everybody,” not in a third- world country. The differential locations of the contact zone [dance music events] become compellingly obvious as droves of poor Indians nag white tourists to give them a fraction of what’s spent on air travel and drugs. In the encounter with beggars and vendors, on the dance floor, hallucinating, the constitution of Goa freaks as foreign, rich, white subjects is at its most acute. (Saldanha, 172)

Saldanha, himself a participant at dance music events in Anjuna, works throughout Psychedelic White to understand this tension between having fun and “just having fun”, between religioush ecstasies alternatively contaminated by and purified of material conditions.

Events [La moment supreme] Priotizing dance music events as the primary sites of his analyses, Saldanha suggests that the peak of racial tensions at dance music events in Anjuna comes during …

… the morning phase at parties, when domestic [Indian] tourists are subtly but predictably forced from the dance floor [by white tourists]. This is putatively because there are many drunk males among them [Indian tourists], but more plainly because the morning phase, visual economy, and sun itself, have, since the seventies, “belonged” to white Goa freaks. (Saldanha, 183)

According to Saldanha’s accounts, these morning phase patterns are as reliable as the sunrise, and reveal a truth about who, exactly, dance music events are for, even in India. Little can describe the feeling of dawn after a night full of dancing, so Goa’s white freaks do their conservative best to maintain the sanctity of sunrise by excluding Indians from participation in this phase.

The morning phase is le moment supreme of both Anjuna’s psy-trance scene and its visual economy. It is not only the most spiritual and sociable moment of psy-trance worldwide. In Goa it is, because of that, also the most racist. (Saldanha, 124)

Saldanha’s theoretical treatment of race is noteworthy for the purposes of this dissertation because it provides an exemplary methodological focus on events. In suggesting that race ensues as a result of the interrelations of a variety of material conditions, he … 83

… tries to address race as an event, not how it is known through discourse or in people’s minds. (Saldanha, 8)

Saldanha studies race as an occurrence, as the happening of material conditions. In Anjuna, race is not coherent as a discourse nor as a genetics, but it makes plenty of sense as an event. Like this dissertation, Psychedelic White uses events as a hermeneutic frame to study its material. But rather than addressing dance music events as events, Saldanha addresses race as an event.

Dancing [Privilege of the dance] The dancing typical of dance music events studied by Saldanha provides further hints about the racial charge of dance music events in Anjuna. Saldanha analyzes trance- dancing to highlight uneven, racially charged access to mystical disorientation that typifies dance music events in Anjuna.

In the trance-dance, sensuous affections beyond ego, tribe, humanity or planet might occur—radically new connections between the dancer’s body and sound, certain rare molecules, sand, vegetation, sun, moon, ocean, even the cows and dogs that walk around the parties in the morning. But these connections are precisely what differentiate bodies. … With Mircea Eliade and William James, [trance-dancing] could be qualified as genuinely mystical. My point is, however, that it is highly unlikely that the chai mama [a worker at the party] … [has] the same … epiphany. The mere fact that [interlocutors were] capable of dancing on LSD that morning, inhabiting Goa trance, opening [their] doors, and pondering celestial movement betrayed [their] location in the distributions of money, education, and opportunities to travel. (Saldanha, 76-77)

Saldanha does not deny the mystical potential of trance-dancing in Anjuna, but he pushes back against assumptions that such a mysticism exists outside of the material and economic conditions of dance music events in Anjuna. Regardless of its mystical potential, and although Saldanha himself participates, trance-dancing in Anjuna smacks of “universalism from a position of white privilege” (Saldanha, 78).

Materiality of Sound [Audible everywhere] Saldanha demonstrates that amplified sound, another presumptive universalism, can quickly become disruptive in Anjuna. Especially during parties (in good seasons, every other day), the whole village becomes a smooth psychedelic space—after all, the music is audible everywhere. (Saldanha, 136)

Saldanha invokes the materiality of sound to elaborate the different relations to music and drugs that different people in Anjuna maintain. Because Anjuna’s local economy relies in both licit and illicit respects on its rave tourism, villagers must regularly tolerate the physical force of ubiquitous amplified beats and rhythms. There is, therefore, no noise without the politics of noise in Anjuna.

The intensive differences between foreigners who want to party and villagers who need to sleep before working was almost bound to lead to conflict. What’s more, as the parties attract more and more Indian youth, foreigners (people who are recognizably itinerant) are blamed for a range of social problems. The government therefore tries to uphold a staunch antiparties, antihippie image for electoral reasons. As a result, denunciations of any intervention of local authorities in the scene abound among freaks. In short, the politics of noise leads to interracial antagonism between freaks and officials. (Saldanha, 163)

The materiality of sound at dance music events in Anjuna is a community concern, one that attracts staunchly opposed opinions. It demands the political navigation of a shared world, as people discover each other submerged in it and in each other.

Darkness [Is white] Saldanha uses darkness to describe a musical cynicism that resembles the “endarkenment” theorized by Reynolds (Saldanha 41). The difference here is that endarkenment takes effect across genres, rather than across time. The following passage differentiates between Goa trance and “psy-trance” (psychedelic trance), a genre with darker predilections and associations.13

13 Trance: Dance of the Boreal Tree Spirits by Espertine . 85

Whereas old-school Goa trance is trippy, elaborate, pompous, at times fluffy, the minimal psy-trance … is eerie and industrial, bordering on the brutal; in the words of M. on 604, a psy-trance discussion list, “dark and serious like a motherfuckin’ cancer baby! …It’s still geared to self-alienation, still recognizably “white.” So, while the history of psychedelic dance culture is an entanglement of trajectories of sounds, travelers, drugs, and scenes, its tendency toward whiteness has not only remained intact, but has perhaps become stronger, as the music became dark and serious like mother-fucking cancer. (Saldanha, 43)

For Saldanha, the darkness that creeps into music and dance music events alongside amphetamine-rich drug cocktails and opportunistic exploitation is also related to practices of self-alienation more broadly. Dark music is white music because it induces altered states, and in Anjuna, such a luxury is reserved for white tourists. Darkness as decadent self-alienation is not purged of its material conditions. On the contrary, in

Anjuna according to Saldanha: the darker the music, the whiter the music.

Ineffability [Poverty and ecstasy] Saldanha recounts an anecdote from January 2001 that holds personal significance. This anecdote frames the stakes of the sense-making endeavors undertaken more broadly throughout Psychedelic White.

The psy-trance was crisp, deep, pumping. I was ordering drinks at the bar with an American-Indian friend. I was tripping; she was just coming up on E. A tired woman in a ragged sari carrying a baby was tapping my hand for change. She wouldn’t stop unless I gave her some. My friend said, with some desperation, “Arun! How do you make sense of all this?” What she meant was … what do I have to say about the juxtaposition of this beggar’s poverty and the drug-induced joy that was whirling around us? … My response was quick: “I don’t! I can’t! It doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t make sense at all.” (Saldanha, 212)

In spite of – or perhaps in response to – the ineffability of this event, Saldanha dedicates his writing to this task of making sense of race at dance music events. And indeed, it leads him to a measured answer to his friend’s question about beggars at dance music events.

They are not Goan beggars; they’re seasonal migrants like the laborers, working for someone or other. Of all Indians, beggars are most forceful in exposing whiteness. In many tourists, poor Indians incite not pity but constant complaining 86

and even contempt…. Beggars hardly ever receive money. Young freaks can stare coldly at begging kids until they leave, or shush them away …. I’ve seen pushing and threats to hit. There seems to be a palpable consensus among the freaks that the presence of vendors and beggars is not merely bothersome, but illegitimate. As with vendors on the beach, the most effective and widespread method for dealing with them is deliberate indifference: just act as if they’re not there. This can get difficult when a half-sleeping underfed kid is pulling at your trousers, making the sign for food as your E is just coming up. (Saldanha, 171)

Saldanha suggests in this passage that even his own half-whiteness is exposed most forcefully by the conditions beggars institute and play with at dance music events in Anjuna. These events are the sites of multiple interconnected economies by which tourists and Anjunkars attempt to profit from each other. Dance music events in Anjuna are not reducible to the dancing tourists or the touring DJs or any single nights, no matter how thick their descriptions. They are intersections of, among other things, multiple economies. Saldanha goes further to demonstrate that dance music events facilitate rapture and psychedelic bliss by obscuring the material conditions that make rapture and bliss possible. He clarifies this in relation to the confusion he felt when first confronted by his friend’s question about making sense.

The reason I stumbled was that it seemed impossible to formulate once and for all what psychedelics in a third-world village was about, while being bombarded by it. I had to surrender to the madness, the complexity, the non-sense. I told my friend she’d get used to it. “You’ll have to focus on the music and the drugs.” The only way to participate in the party as a tourist, to enjoy the dancing, was to bracket the deep social inequality that made your enjoyment possible. Goa’s trance-dance experience can’t emerge without this amnesia. So it was all making sense: I was understanding things about psychedelics while doing it. It just takes time to formulate. Making sense is a sensuous, shimmering, ongoing, by definition unfinished business, and never done alone. (Saldanha, 212)

Caught up in the sense of an event that is incompatible with the sense of his friend’s question, Saldanha finds himself unable to answer. Saldanha, at that moment, is being produced by a machine that requires the obscurity of its material conditions. In the end, it makes sense for Saldanha that dance music events resist in situ sense making.

Critique [Suggestions] Making sense of racial tensions and power dynamics at psychedelic dance music events is a daunting task in Anjuna. But Saldanha’s dedicated research leads him to multiple critical conclusions that find their bases in the material conditions that facilitate dance music events. This enables Saldanha to offer relevant perspectives on those very tensions and dynamics in relation to, for example, the institution of party bans by Anjuna’s local government.

It goes without saying that it is the tourism-dependent Anjunkars who suffer the most from party bans. Foreign drug dealers can make money anywhere; police and politicians will get baksheesh [bribes] from other sectors; deejays can play at raves in other countries. The party bans only rub it in that locals are local and need to make their money in Anjuna itself. They’ve built shacks and expensive Internet cafes, they’ve laid down all the mats, changed the look of the entire landscape—all for nothing if loud music remains illegal. If psy-trance were to stop, it’s difficult to think how Anjuna is going to survive. (Saldanha, 181)

Saldanha then puts forth several strategies in the face of crackdowns on dance music events that Anjuna faces in 2006, immediately prior to the publication of Psychedelic White.

An obvious first step to do anything about the scene is to do away with all the Catholic moralism and to legalize loud music during the night in designated areas. The scene has to be regulated. It will be then possible to organize raves at regular venues outside the villages …. Instead of bribes, organizers pay taxes. (Saldanha, 201)

Having dealt with the religious conservativism that is, in Anjuna, so often a conversation stopper, Saldanha turns his sharp gaze to the freaks. He anticipates pushback from tourists who decry the compromised authenticity of dance music events routinized by bureaucratic negotiations with the local government by encouraging pragmatic critical reflections.

If negotiation and exposure are deemed to threaten Anjuna’s “authenticity,” it should be asked how authentic the present state of affairs is. (Saldanha, 204)

These suggestions directed towards Anjuna’s political economy come at the conclusion of almost a decade of work and involvement by Saldanha at different levels of the researched events. Saldanha concludes that dance music events are elements of Anjuna’s economic well-being, and he accordingly advocates measured approaches to their production and regulation. By studying the sense of race as it clarifies itself at dance music events, Saldanha becomes intimately acquainted with the nuanced political economics of Anjuna’s tourist industry. From the dance floor, he offers critical suggestions concerning the future of dance music events in Anjuna.

Psychedelic White is of additional interest to this dissertation in light of Saldanha’s connections to the Twin Cities. Saldanha is a professor at the University of Minnesota, and I met with him briefly in his office once to talk shop about writing projects around dance music events. But I also ran into him at a warehouse dance music event once as we were both trying to find our ways home in the creeping hours of a Sunday morning. Saldanha, like readers of this dissertation, is connected to dance music events in the Twin Cities and Anjuna.

Technomad: Global Raving Countercultures (2009)

… a new form of global-oriented event had emerged in which dance music was integral. (Reynolds, 146).

Graham St. John is one of the most prolific scholars of dance music events working today. Since completing a historical ethnography on ConFest – Australia’s preeminent transformational festival – for his dissertation in 1999, he has published numerous monographs and edited several anthologies on dance music events in local scenes and global networks. He specializes in psytrance (also Saldanha’s music of choice) and is a Burning Man researcher.

Events [Teknivals] In Technomad: Global Raving Countercultures, the task St. John sets himself involves a 89 new theorization of dance music events as they resemble the carnivalesque, a hermeneutic device developed by literary historian Mikhail Bakhtin. Reynolds suggests considering dance music events as as 15th century carnivals updated with technology and contemporary music for the 21st century. He terms contemporary dance music events teknivals.

… the flourishing of EDMC [Electronic Dance Music Cultures] reveals the popular return of the carnival that, as understood by Mikhail Bakhtin in Rabelais and His World, is the people’s “second world,” a subterranean enclave including fairs and popular feasts, mummery, dancing, and open-air amusements evident since antiquity and increasingly domesticated in recent European history (i.e., the history of Christianity). The carnival is a world of spontaneity, laughter, and outrageous fun, a licentious landscape of play and immediacy in which habitués become “an indissoluble part of the collectivity,” becoming quite literally the body of the people. Amidst the “archaic grotesque” of the dance floor and the dance festival where the body-in-dance outgrows itself, transgresses its limits, becomes mutable, “the individual body ceases to a certain extent to be itself…[as] the people become aware of their sensual, material bodily unity and community” (Bakhtin 1968: 255). But at the same time, the carnival contextualizes the theatrical-like performance of the self, of the persona, exceeding the everyday persona and quite literally becoming an other self. (St. John 2009, 121)

St. John transposes the functions of Bakhtin’s carnivalesque into a sociotheoretical register to read the rebellious, even revolutionary potential of contemporary dance music events scattered across the globe. Although he does not clarify how Rabelais develops the carnivalesque as a literary hermeneutic (specifically for the writings of François Rabelais), St. John’s impressions of the liminal, antistructural bent of this contemporary global carnivalesque shines through.

These non-hierarchical and non-commercial carnivals would fuel an underground cultural economy centering around the production and performance of tekno musics. The teknival would become an anarcho-techno arts carnival celebrating a decentralized and autonomous music culture emerging from a climate of independence enabled by new digital audio, chemical, and communications technologies. (St. John 2009, 129)

As carnivalesque, dance music events compete with dominant social paradigms and models by way of their persistent methods and enchanting forces.

… these are events which puncture day-to-day life with a reality-field consistent with an alternative model. Offering competing models, these events are thus efforts to enhance, magnify, or mediate the alternative preliminal conditions of participating groups, who project their artistic and political visions upon the festal interzones which become experimental theatres of change. (St. John 2009, 147)

For St. John, dance music events are carnivalesque because “an event is more than just a party” (St. John 2009, 249). It is also chance to puncture the real with the different, and it is by definition connected to other chances to do so.

Ineffability [Politics] St. John invokes ineffability when describing that the politics of carnivalesque dance music events are imprecise or vague due specifically to the multiple acts of resistance that characterize those politics. The resistance typical of dance music events is resistance of multiple different things. For St. John, these multiple resistances frustrate scholarly analyses that seek out coherent politics, but this is because they are the conditions of a different kind of politics that predominates at dance music events, and not in scholarly analyses. So St. John constructs a more complex framework capable of analyzing multiple resistances typical of contemporary global dance music events.

What is required is a nuanced framework enabling the interpretation of a range of behavior as resistant, and which thus opens up existing frameworks of resistance across disciplinary fields. (St. John 2009, 16)

Technomad’s framework embraces many different types of resistance at many different types of events and sorts them according to nine interrelated modes of response to “local centers and conspicuous symbols of global capital” (St. John 2009, 221).

The Dionysian resists isolation and posits ekstasis; the outlaw finds identity in its own illicitness; the exile seeks liberty in exodus from prejudice and patriotism; the avant knows rebellion in pushing the boundaries of art; the spiritualist seeks the reenchantment and revitalization of self and society; reclaimers replace commercialism and the cult of the celebrity with the folk; safety tribes seek to minimize harm through education; reactionaries fight for the right to party; and 91

activists mobilize around specific ultimate causes like ecology, anti-neo- liberalism, and peace. (St. John 2009, 257)14

For St. John, it makes perfect sense that, when viewed from any single one of the nine nodes in the spectrum, dance music events appear as inadequate and vague rejoinders to the malicious powers that they insist they resist. To appreciate the variegated ambitions of the teknival, then, critics must investigate the extent to which tekinvals succeed in accommodating “heterogeneous vibes” (St. John 2009, 138). Critics of contemporary dance music events must take into account the entire …

… spectrum of activity, each node populated by actors who may not only possess fashion sensibilities, the freshest tunes, and the latest gestures, but variously possess a response-conditioning experiential awareness of ennui, loneliness and world-weariness, police harassments and criminalization, sexual and racial discrimination, artistic convention, spiritual malaise, corporate rip-offs, harm minimization, in addition to a range of other worldly concerns. In each case, actors … respond accordingly. (St. John 2009, 256-257)

The ineffability of the politics of carnivalesque dance music events is indebted to the multiplicity of the sites of resistance fostered in those dance music events. St. John does not go so far as to argue that these politics are entirely ineffable, but it is clear that they resist scholarly attempts to analyze any single coherent political platform.

Critique [Protestival] St. John describes collaborations between protest movements and teknival formats that decry with a certain panache what he understands as the spread of global capitalism and neoliberal political projects as both proliferate through the end of the millennium.

Throughout the 1990s, EDMC would become recruited into the service of causes beyond its own reproduction. In the late 1990s, EDMC became part of a tactical assemblage integrated with the emergent alter-globalization movement, and it was the protestival template endogenous to Reclaim the Streets which provided the catalyst for the dance-carnival’s proliferation in the contemporary, especially as a mode of direct action. (St. John 2009, 234)

14 St. John discusses definitions and characteristics of each of these nine nodes, but this dissertation does not. 92

For St. John, teknivals, protestivals, and Reclaim The Streets are all the antithesis of the global spread of capitalism into localitiesBut their antagonistic charisma is easily routinized.

While clubs can be and are experimental and creative, the corralling of the dance experience in standardized clubs and festival frameworks conditioned by increasingly arduous permit requirements, dress and behavior codes, security searches, penetrative surveillance, and the application of copyright standards is commonly perceived to undermine the immediate and experimental social esthetic of the dance vibe. (St. John 2009, 11)

Materiality of Sound [Unauthorized power] As protest groups like Reclaim the Streets are drawn to the intensifying potentials of amplified sound, police take note of the significance of mobile sound systems to unauthorized gatherings. Loud music changes the sense of belonging for a crowd, and St. John recounts how contests for crowd control become contests for sound control.

… it was recognized that mobile sound equipment provided a rapid and effective means of mobilizing a crowd. Wherever there was a mobile PA, depending on the sound quality, and the successful efforts to defend it and its power source from the police, there would be an instant party. With a mass of bodies responding to pulsating rhythms, an organic machine consisting of a wild blur of gesticulating appendages has proven to be an effective obstruction device. And pleasurable besides. (St. John 2009, 209)

At the end of the 21st Century, music at carnivalesque dance music events is a solid, quantifiable, sensible “pulsating rhythm” that seeks relationships with the material of peoples’ minds and bodies. These relationships play out at dance music events, but also at protests, and in other events.

Dancing [Right to dance] But St. John writes that the new millennium is skeptical about this “global post-rave counterculture”, this decentralized dancing (St. John 2009, 92). St. John illustrates multiple repressive measures put into place by federal governments in Britain, the US, and France as the 1990s draw to a close. Of course, the dancing does not stop. After 93 the passage of legislation meant to clamp down on dance music events in the US, New York City becomes a hub of dancing resistance.

Rallying to protect dance as a right of human expression under the First Amendment, Metropolis in Motion orchestrated a “24-hour Dance Marathon” by Madison Square Park on 9-10 February 2007 to raise awareness about the laws. The campaign suffered a setback when the Supreme Court’s Appellate Division upheld the laws with the ruling that “Recreational dancing is not a form of expression protected by the federal or state constitutions,” and that the existing laws “protect the health, safety and general welfare of the public by limiting noise, congestion and various hazards in residential areas.” … Now an annual event, over one hundred dance organizations parade on Broadway and convene in Tompkins Square Park where a DanceFest showcases diverse dance cultures (inclusive of DJ dance cultures and many other besides) mobilizing in the defense of the right to dance in New York City. (St. John 2009, 200)

As dancing is a sort of functional philosophy of participation with respect to certain dance music event formats, the cancellation of those dance-oriented dance music events is perceived by people in New York City as the cancellation of dance. Dancing, for these annual protesters, is some kind of right.

Darkness [Dark-psy] In specifying one last corner of the teknival, St. John mentions a specific genre of music also studied by Saldanha: dark-psy. Dark-psy music is related to “a techno-spiritual movement concentrated within psychedelic trance”, or, as Saldanha names it, psy- trance (St. John 2009, 27). St. John does not go into specifics concerning the apparent religioush darkness of “dark-psy”; his readers’ comprehension of this usage is assumed.

Club Cultures: Music, Media and Subcultural Capital (1995) Sarah Thornton is an art critic and historian, and a sometimes clubber, who analyzes the economic hierarchies that typify the dance music events St. John celebrates. Thornton’s Club Cultures: Music, Media and Subcultural Capital provides necessary counterpoints to the pictures of essentially non-hierarchical and non-commercial carnivalesque dance music events painted by St. John. Published more than a decade 94 earlier in 1995, Club Cultures insists that hierarchies permeate dance music events such as club nights and raves. Thornton does not dispute the power of clubs to transport attendees to other places by virtue of sound, architecture, and darkness. According to Thornton, clubs do indeed…

… offer other-worldly environments in which to escape; they act as interior havens with such presence that the dancers forget local time and place and sometimes even participate in an imaginary global village of dance sounds. Clubs achieve these effects with loud music, distracting interior design and lighting effects. British clubs rarely have windows through which to look into or out of the club. Classically, they have long winding corridors punctuated by a series of thresholds which separate inside from outside, private from public, the dictates of dance abandon from the routine rules of school, work and parental home. (Thornton, 21)

But these fantasies of escape are often confused with “substantive political rights and freedoms” (Thornton, 21). Thornton is emphatic that the other places to which clubbers are transported are alternative, but anything but nonhierarchical.

Rather than subverting dominant cultural patterns in the manner attributed to classic subcultures, these clubber and raver ideologies offer ‘alternatives’ in the strict sense of the word, namely other social and cultural hierarchies to put in their stead. They may magically resolve certain socio-economic contradictions, but they also maintain them, even use them to their advantage. (Thornton, 115)

Dance music events can transport attendees to other places, but those other places are not somehow magically resolved of the socioeconomic conditions to which they are indebted, or which they exploit.

Critique [Chimera of a negative mainstream] Thornton’s strongest argument takes a disciplinary approach to the misinterpretation of hierarchies at dance music events. Thornton is more frustrated at her colleagues within her discipline (art criticism and cultural studies) who are, themselves, prone to bouts of fantastical escapism. Although these scholars don’t often find their ways to raves, they do find the idea of dance music events particularly inviting in weak moments of less- 95 than-rigorous indulgence. According to Thornton, cultural studies scholars are often quick to condemn an imprecise mainstream, and they just as often make subcultures suspiciously convenient examples of resistance against the mainstream. Thornton is, to say the least, unimpressed with these tendencies.

Inconsistent fantasies of the mainstream are rampant in subcultural studies. They are probably the single most important reason why subsequent cultural studies find pockets of symbolic resistance wherever they look …. Rather than making a clear comparison, weighing the social and economic factors, and confronting the ethical and political problems involved in celebrating the culture of one social group over another, they invoke the chimera of a negative mainstream. (Thornton, 93)

Thornton is frustrated with scholars who adjudicate the significance of social trends from their campus offices. She notes that this tendency is especially rampant in the Birmingham School of Cultural Studies and its lineages of influence. People studying dance music events often brush over their socioeconomic and material conditions in excitement over the alterities they offer.

Events [Night of research] As a significant component of the research that goes into her conclusive thesis, Thornton attends a wide variety of dance music events over the course of four years. Dance music events as serial multiplicities serve as the field site for Club Cultures.

Between 1988 and 1992, I acted as a participant observer at over two hundred discos, clubs and raves and attended at least thirty live gigs for comparative purposes. (Thornton, 106)

In Chapter 3, Thornton takes readers along on the Saturday night of September 22nd, 1990 as she visits two clubs and a rave in London. In other chapters she conducts interviews, performs close readings of magazines and other music publications, and studies the history of contemporary dance music events, but attendance at dance music events constitutes the most comprehensive aspect of the research found in Club Cultures. And it should, for, according to Thornton, dance music events are crucial to understanding club cultures. Thornton states that she is “concerned with the attitudes 96 and ideals of the youthful insiders whose social lives revolve around clubs and raves”, and again that club culture is “the colloquial expression given to youth cultures for whom dance clubs and their ‘80s offshoots, raves, are the symbolic axis and working social hub” (Thornton 2, 3). For Thornton, dance music events are the multiple, serial hubs of her object of study, hence her extensive in-person examinations. Thornton sets out to theorize the hierarchies of an event subculture, as opposed to a fashion subculture or a literary subculture.

Dancing [Crowds] Close participant-observation involvement with dance music events allows Thornton to comment on the significance of the dancing crowds for these events.

What authenticates contemporary dance cultures is the buzz or energy which results from the interaction of records, DJ and crowd. ‘Liveness’ is displaced from the stage to the dancefloor, from the worship of the performer to a veneration of ‘atmosphere’ or ‘vibe’. The DJ and dancers share the spotlight as de facto performers; the crowd becomes a self-conscious cultural phenomenon – one which generates moods immune to reproduction, for which you have to be there. This is even more pronounced when it comes to raves …. (Thornton, 29-30)

According to Thornton, dance music events constitute peculiar performances because the people performing music exist in a collaborative relationship with the people consuming the music. Dancers are performers too, and they have their own valid claims to authentic musical experiences. In Club Cultures, the crowd is no passive receptacle for a performer’s musical expertise. Thornton concedes that certain – although not all – hierarchies are troubled – although not annihilated.

Darkness [Dark spaces] Thornton notes that darkness plays into the consolidation of dancing crowds; dance music events are, after all, “a culture that is supposed to take place in the dark” (Thornton 127). She cites Angela McRobbie’s thinking on the similarities between the discotheque and the cinema to further the belonging of darkness.

… both [the cinema and the discotheque] offer “a darkened space where the [individual] can retain a degree of anonymity and absorption . . . but where the cinema offers a one-way fantasy which is directed solely through the gaze of the spectator at the screen, the fantasy of dancing is more social, more reciprocated” (McRobbie 1984: 146). (Thornton, 65)15

Darkness in this usage, is related to the self-alienation realized by people absorbed in something besides themselves. The darkness of a dance music event, therefore, allows attendees to be swept up and out of themselves, into alternative identities imbedded in alternative hierarchies.

Materiality of Sound [Altered states] In the second chapter, concerned primarily with the history of dance music events in London, the materiality of sound comes to the fore. Thornton recounts the conditions by which mixing records for dancing audiences becomes a preferrable, or at least popular, leisure format.

The new record format was better suited for playing at high volume over club sound-systems and its extended versions had instrumental breaks where the song was stripped down to the drums and bass with very little vocal in order to facilitate seamless mixing of one track into another. … These extended dance ‘tracks’ (rather than ‘songs’) helped sustain the momentum of the dancefloor and contributed to the other-worldly atmosphere of the discotheque. The constant pulse of the bass blocks thoughts, affects emotions and enters the body. Like a drug, rhythms can lull one into another state. With rave culture, this potentiality was actively ritualized as the ‘trance dance’ by dancers actively seeking an altered state of consciousness through movement to the music. (Thornton, 59- 60)

In this passage, Thornton emphasizes that discotheques present the possibility of a new interaction between technologies designed for the intersections of sound recording, playback, amplification, and dancing bodies at dance music events. She suggests that these material conditions – especially the amplification of beats and rhythms – are mechanically connected to the altered states of consciousness of certain dancing bodies.

15 “Dance and Social Fantasy” in Gender and Generation eds. McRobbie and Nava. 98

Ineffability [Absolute opposition] Thornton’s fourth chapter investigates “the stories that subcultural youth tell about media and commerce”, and more specifically “the idea that authentic culture is somehow outside media and commerce” (Thornton, 116 and 160). Thornton alludes throughout the chapter to an “absolute and essentialist ideological opposition between subcultures and the media” that characterizes “underground ideologies” (Thornton, 160). She disproves this opposition, or at least offers a reading of it that allows the people who speak it into being to be wrong in an authentic way. After all …

… youth’s ‘underground’ ideologies imply a lot but understand little about cultural production. Their views of media have other agendas to fill. (Thornton, 121)

Thornton takes a moment at the beginning of this chapter to reassure readers that her treatment of this predominant thesis, like the entirety of Club Cultures, is informed by a great deal of thorough research.

First, it derives from my ethnographic research in clubs; I was careful to pay heed to passing comments, and to question clubbers, about their use of and attitudes towards diverse media. … Second, it draws on interviews with professionals in the field – particularly club organizers, journalists and record company PR and promotions people. Finally, it is based on a extensive textual analysis of the media under consideration. (Thornton, 118)

Unfortunately, readers encounter only one excerpt from any of these interviews and conversations, and it comes from an interview with a writer for a niche media publication (Thornton, 146). With this exception, all of the evidence that Thornton provides in this chapter is excerpted from published magazines. As a result, readers only encounter the absolute opposition which grounds this chapter as it is described third-hand by Thornton or by magazines. People encountered at dance music events – or for that matter any people who stand by this reported opposition of subculture and media – remain silent. This chapter’s result is folded in a fitting manner; the thesis question of this chapter (of the absolute opposition between “authentic culture” and “media”) is simultaneously disproved and proved. Thornton disproves it by reminding readers of the cybernetic complexities of any and all germinating cultures. 99

Culture emerges from above and below, from within and without media, from under- and overground. (Thornton, 141)

But on the other hand, the thesis is proved by the total absence of any voices who could verify it. The opposition to the media that is supposedly characteristic of the people Thornton speaks to at dance music events manifests in their total absence from the Club Cultures. The strength with which Thornton confronts this thesis, without ever presenting it in a quoted, cited, or sourced form, results in an unspoken conclusion that holds water and leaks at the same time.

Club Cultures and Female Subjectivity: The Move From Home to House (2001) In her book Club Cultures and Female Subjectivity, Maria Pini, a scholar of social dance, questions Thornton’s prioritization of subcultural capital as the defining feature of dance music events. Pini values dance music events for the performative experiments they facilitate for women, more than the utopia they realize for humanity.

At a time when femininity – its meanings, identity and life-course – is undergoing a quite radical loosening up, when traditional forms of ‘community’ are quite rapidly eroding, when a sense of impermanence increasingly comes to mark relationships and work, instant and ephemeral dance-cultural ‘worlds’ are being generated; worlds within which ‘madness’, ‘autonomy’ and self-absorption can coexist alongside senses of absolute unity and complete connectedness. Within this world ‘losing it’ is made safe. Whether this means the loss of femininity’s traditional landmarks, or the loss of ‘sanity’ and ‘head’ which can come from raving, loss is somehow made manageable. (Pini, 192-193)

Pini suggests that contemporary clubs constitute sites of potential belonging for British women caught up in the dynamics and changes in their social roles and personal identities. Club Culture and Female Subjectivity suggests how the chaos of indeterminate social relations plays out at dance music events designed for that express purpose, rather than in a real world caught in a state of denial.

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Dancing [Philosophical treatments] In addition to providing safe places for people to experiment with subjectivity and madness, dance music events have lessons in store. They facilitate learning experiences regarding relevant and dynamic social conditions, and they suggest reconciliations of those conditions with people’s lives.

Living with the temporary, coping with confusion and dealing with ‘madness’ – these are some of the skills seemingly being explored within contemporary rave cultures. (Pini, 171)

But Pini is not the first to posit the adaptive effects of social dancing. She shows that Luce Irigaray and Jacques Derrida both dance to feel out the imprecision of categories, and to navigate unexplored terrain, specifically with regard to identity. According to Irigaray, dance …

… describes subjectivity in terms of a set of relations which are not based upon a clear split between subject and object, or between interiority and exteriority. (Pini 159)

For Irigaray, dancing represents a type of subjectivity that puts insides into relation with outsides. So Pini cites Irigaray’s uses of dancing in descriptions of psychological development in female children with respect to mothers. According to Derrida’s more multiple model, on the other hand, dancing …

… is the destabilization of sexual categories …. It thus becomes a metaphor through which to imagine a certain disorganisation of subjectivity – a history not based on continuities, dualism and consensus but rather, upon dissymmetry, multiplicity and the innumerable. (Pini, 159)

For Derrida, rather than a performance of the relations between subject and world, dancing is more of an unfixing of sorts. It is not limited to the navigation between inside and outside, or across definite boundaries; dancing detaches dancers from those boundaries. 101

Pini’s presentations of both Derrida’s and Irigaray’s usages of dancing always find people’s bodies moving in relationship with forces that exceed those people’s controls. Both understandings find people dancing in the unknowable.

Darkness [Unprofessional narcissism] Pini highlights a quote from one interlocutor, Jane, who discusses her own “dark side”.

The rave environment appears to afford her a very different sense of self from that which she embodies in her everyday life as a part-time counselor: It’s not necessarily the dark side of you. But it’s the messy side of you. It’s about doing whatever the fuck you want and without thinking you’ve got to be there for somebody else. It’s being there for yourself and being ‘off your face’ and not having to really think about anybody else. (Jane in Pini, 39)

Pini does not clarify or offer an explicit interpretation of what Jane means by dark, but it seems that darkness is not easily ordered into a presentation suitable for a workplace once released at a dance music event. This dark side is a step further than messy, and it requires a particular narcissism. People entering the darkness don’t know what they’ll find, and they might not have many resources share with others once they have found it.

Critique [Popular] Pini suggests that, by virtue of their involvement in dance music events, her interlocutors are themselves performing collective, spontaneous, experimental fictions. In doing so, they incorporate concepts and social skills into their subjectivities. Pini aims to elucidate “a kind of popular ‘feminist’ critique which appears to operate within club cultures themselves” (Pini, 36). This critique is cooperative and progressive.

It is I think, very significant that the playing out of a kind of ‘madness’ which these women speak of, is a communal enactment – a collective and ecstatic staging of ambiguity and ‘madness’, which simultaneously allows for the generation of a shared sense of belongingness and of community. In many respects, rave seems to draw these aspects of belongingness and community out of confusion and ambiguity, appearing to provide some kind of both symbolic and practical solution. (Pini, 109)

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Moreover, this popular feminist critique at play in dance music events has pragmatic value for its accessibility, especially in comparison to the options put forth in academic philosophies. Dance music events offer a popular feminist critique to people who otherwise would not access parallel projects in their academic forms.

In short, I want to suggest that rave can usefully be considered in parallel to … often heady philosophical debates – as constituting a popular reframing or refictioning of the world; a reframing which problematizes the same dualisms and conceptual frameworks currently under attack from philosophy. (Pini, 155-156)

Pini suggests that dance music events provide access to relevant intellectual projects otherwise ensconced in academic philosophy. The heft of Pini’s suggestion is as notable as the barriers of access that prevent academic philosophy from achieving popular legibility. Keeping an ear to Thornton’s work, Pini does not suggest that there are no barriers to this dance music event-based popular critique. But she insists that the significant differences between those ad hoc barricades and the polished walls of the ivory tower bear acknowledgment.

Materiality of Sound [Machinic assemblages] Unlike their heady philosophical counterparts, these critical experiments with identity characteristic of dance music events are not limited to discursive domains. According to Pini, in lieu of a seminar setting and a formal approach to a disciplinary canon, popular critiques at dance music events are intimately caught up in machines, brain chemistry, architecture, and music.

It is possible to see how, within rave, subjectivity and corporeality are being restated. The ‘body’ within rave is no longer simply the physical human body, or even a collection of these. Rather, this body includes technology (in the form of music, lighting and visuals), chemicals (in the form of drugs) and the ‘spiritual’. This body is perhaps best understood therefore, in terms of what I have called a mind/body/spirit/technology assemblage. I have … concentrated primarily upon one aspect of this assemblage – embodied experiences. However, in highlighting the centrality of technology within this ‘body’, for example, I have also shown how this [embodied experience] (like chemicals, music or architecture) is an important ‘actor’ within this constitution. Hence, although I am working with personal accounts, these are thought of as part of a wider machinery. (Pini, 169)

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Music, for Pini, is an interconnected, active, technological material component of the machinic assemblage of raving subjectivities and bodies. Music genres are not significant in Club Cultures and Female Subjectivity, nor are differing performance techniques or the specificities of sound engineering. In fact, Pini rarely differentiates music from sound; the primary function in both cases is to impose the conditions of an elsewhere.

Ineffability [Multiplicity] For Pini, dynamic assemblages such as music or bodies or musical bodies at dance music events require openendedness from analytic approaches. Pini critiques her discipline (cultural studies of subcultures and social dancing) for a lack of openendedness and a rampant penchant for reductive totalitarianism in interpretations of dance music events.

… we have to resist the kind of totalitarianism which very clearly underlies much existing club cultural criticism. By totalitarian I am referring to the assumption that club cultures can be reduced to, or read in terms of, a singular meaning structure. Hence, it is common to read of rave being ultimately, or at very least centrally, about one thing. In Thornton’s case it is about an accumulation of subcultural capital. In others, it is about ‘escape’ … ‘meaninglessness’ … an ultimately ‘free corporeal expression’… or about a Body without Organs. Such totalitarianism is perhaps most surprising in the works collected within Rave Off because although many of these authors are intent on stressing the fundamental ‘meaninglessness’ of rave, this stress has precisely the opposite effect. It asserts that rave is fundamentally or essentially about a collapse of meaning. (Pini, 54)

For Pini, the fact that dance music events present multiple meanings certainly does not mean that they herald the collapses of those meanings. For her interlocutors, dance music events are not only about the collapse of meaning. To reduce them to this single interpretation involves a great deal of projection and wishful thinking on the part of scholars.

Viewing contemporary club cultures as essentially reducible to one thing is clearly problematic. Not only do such representations fail to engage with the complexities and diversity of these cultures, but they enable very oversimplistic value judgements to be made. So, in terms of their ‘political’ significance, contemporary club cultures are quite often read as being either ‘positive’ or 104

‘negative’, ‘progressive’ or ‘retrogressive’ and so forth. It should be obvious that within cultures so wide and varied as those which make up the contemporary social dance scene, there are bound to be both ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ cultural- political features, enabling possibilities and disempowering forcers, liberating potentials and oppressive tendencies, spaces for the explorations of radically ‘alternative’ subjectivities and instances in which existing social divisions are reinforced. In order that these sometimes contradictory features be made apparent, it is necessary to admit to the multiplicity of rave culture, and attend to the different ways in which ravers can come to make sense of this culture. (Pini, 55)

Openness to the fact that dance music events bear multiple meanings for two people dancing with each other is an aspect of the confusion and madness that Pini’s interlocutors must navigate by dancing at dance music events. And it is this same openness to multiplicity that has the potential to bring those two dancers together into the immersive hold of a monstrous, musical machinic assemblage.

Events [Participant] Although they are not the centerpiece of her study that culture is, Pini attends dance music events for research purposes. Events serve as a crucial juncture for her study, providing her opportunities to contact interlocutors, many of whom are “contacted after responding to adverts given out between 1992 and 1994 at a variety of (both free and charged) London-based dance events” (Pini 83). Pini’s own experiences at these events come to ground her research questions even as they dislodge her from traditional methodologies.

Although I did not operate within any kind of traditional ethnographic framework, I was at pains to visit as wide a variety of London-based dance events as possible. These included, free raves which were held in squatted buildings, disused warehouses or outdoors (and which were usually one-off events, publicised by fliers or word of mouth), all-women events, and a variety of techno-music events held in clubs. I therefore spent much time during my research within clubs and raves, although I never felt comfortable, or particularly pushed towards, ‘observing’ in that detached way which the term ‘participant observation’ can imply. Because I was just as interested in experience and subjectivity as I was in things which could be seen or observed, I tended to concentrate, within these situations, upon what I was feeling, experiencing and thinking just as much as I focused on the outward behaviours of other. Of course these are extremely 105

oversimplistic distinctions to make, but the point is that my aim was never really to take up the position of a detached onlooker. (Pini, 89)

Pini has personal experiences with the musical machinic assemblage she describes, not only because she puts it under a microscope. Indeed, her descriptions of these assemblages are rooted in her participation in dance music events.

“Can You Feel It To?”: Intimacy and Affect at Electronic Dance Music Events in Paris, Chicago, and Berlin (2011)

Luis-Manuel Garcia is a music writer who has published with multiple platforms including Resident Advisor, Wired, Red Bull Music Academy, and MixMag. Garcia’s 2011 dissertation for the University of Chicago is a multisited ethnography that asks how intimacy so consistently arises at dance music events. “Can You Feel It To?” Intimacy and Affect at Electronic Dance Music Events in Paris, Chicago, and Berlin works towards …

… a better understanding of how a mostly-anonymous nocturnal leisure world such as an Electronic Dance Music (EDM) scene can produce scenes of social warmth between strangers. (Garcia, 329)

Multiple factors contribute to “social warmth”: vague social relations, embedded critiques of societal conditions, dancing, the materiality of sound, and darkness.

Ineffability [Indeterminacy] Garcia focuses on the ambiguous nature of the relationships between people who encounter each other at dance music events. The inability to precisely define the conditions of relationships formed at dance music events becomes crucial to the intimacy characteristic between people at dance music events.

We may not be intimate friends or even acquaintances, but something about being on the dancefloor prompts us, sometimes, to act as if we were. My claim is that this “something”—the “something” that allows us to live in the “as-if” of stranger-intimacy—thrives in the indeterminacy of the conditions of our 106

togetherness arising from these semi-anonymous crowds; it is this lack of clear knowledge about what it means to share a dancefloor with others that makes a particular form of togetherness possible. (Garcia, 167)

For Garcia, dance music events thrive on vague relationships between people; or, differently stated, the relationships between people at dance music events are not easily explicable. People come to know each other and fall into intimate step under disorienting conditions and invert the old precaution; instead of trying to beware of strangers, people at dance music events be there with strangers.

Critique [Embedded diversity] Garcia suggests that broader social and geopolitical trends and popular community values are detectable in the door policies of dance music events. One example is the common preference at dance music events for attendees who represent diverse demographics. But Garcia is nonetheless suspicious of the constructive or authentic qualities of the diversity that characterizes dance music events. His analysis questions whether door policies that favor diversity are the result of ethical or – perhaps more likely – aesthetic priorities of the promoters of dance music events.

What concerns me here, however, is how a simplistic opposition between homogeneity and heterogeneity can cover over inequities of social/civil belonging by enabling scenes of managed diversity to be misrecognized as discrimination- free zones. I suggest that, at EDM nightclubs in Paris and Berlin, it is these practices and discourses of embedded diversity that enable these scene participants and gatekeepers to manage the dissonance between a utopian desire for scenes of inclusive collectivity (particularly as in inheritance from the rave era of the 90s) and the practices of exclusion that help make such scenes possible. (Garcia, 326)

Garcia, like Pini, sees a popular critique at play in dance music events albeit from a different angle. Pini tracks the critiques absorbed and performed by dancers, while Garcia excavates the critique embedded by promoters and venue owners. The contents and performances of the critiques are different, but readers should keep in mind that Garcia’s and Pini’s writings are published a decade apart.

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Dancing [Implied in intimate touch] In asking questions about touch-based intimacy at dance music events, Garcia invites readers to consider the central function of dance. Everything, especially physical contact, happens on the dance floor or in direct relationships to the dance floor. This is especially discernible in Garcia’s emphasis that touch works several different ways, but it’s always with respect to dancing.

In my own experience, there are several ways in which touch can be functional: it can serve as a form of communication to other dancers around you as you move through the crowd; it can be a form of perception, palpating the mass of bodies around you when vision and/or hearing are hampered; it can be the result of an effort to regain balance in frenetically dancing crowd; and it can be a function of the sheer density of the crowd itself. (Garcia, 86)

People in the crowd are communicating, perceiving, orienting themselves, and collectively submerged in a dancing mass. Dancing is the rule; it is always already contextualizing the intimate touches that strangers can share, and, indeed, any communications they might exchange, intentionally or unintentionally.

Materiality of Sound [Tactile] The materiality of sound is also an aspect of the social warmth that interests Garcia. It too is related to the tactile intimacy characteristic of dance music events, because sound, too, can touch people.

Hearing is, after all, a kind of touch-sense. The ear drum and its cilia register carrying impacts of air molecules as they move and are compressed and rarefied, reading the texture of these impacts in the way one might run a finger over the surface of an object. Furthermore, sound is not only registered at the eardrum; it can impact the whole body. Vibrations can be “heard” as much on the skin as in the ear …. This is particularly noteworthy in the context of a nightclub, where powerful sound-systems are usually employed to project sound at such high decibel-levels that sonic vibrations become quite literally tactile. (Garcia, 107)

Tactility, already amplified in the dancing at dance music events, is doubled again by the immersive materiality of sound at these events. Although perhaps this is not merely 108 a doubling, because different amplified sounds interact differently with different parts of listening bodies.

Acoustically, the different densities and dispositions of body parts entail different, partial, and localized resonant frequencies; for example, the terms “head voice” and “chest voice” in vocal pedagogy attests to the fact that higher frequencies find resonance in the smaller cavities of the face and head, while lower frequencies resonate through the chest. … One might imagine that sound can strike various zones of the body differently, creating a complex affective pattern of resonances that may be felt as more or less coherent, more or less conflicted. Since these bodily zones and parts can also move with varying degrees of independence, the body is able to mediate the multiplicities of sonic affect through similarly multiple gestures. … this notion of the dancing body as being capable of polyphonic/polyrhythmic expressivity suggests helpfully that the body might experience heterogeneous, multiple, and complex affects. (Garcia, 193)

The dancing bodies at dance music events resonate with the frequencies in which they are submerged, together. Each body is composed of zones that correspond to different sounds that transform it from something that conducts itself to something that is a conductor of vibrations. Dancing bodies are immersed in fields of vibrations, and this immersion is amplified by the resonant vibrations of the immersed bodies with the immersive music.

Darkness [Berghain] Darkness also contributes specifically to the experiences of “enveloping touch” at dance music events. For Garcia, “the absence of windows, dark interiors lit in oblique or erratic ways, smoke machines filling empty space and shortening the field of vision” are all indicators that “sonic immersion or envelopment is thus a design goal of nightclubs” (Garcia, 107). And within these darkened clubs hide darker corners still. Garcia transports readers to a world famous club in Berlin to illustrate this darkness.

There seems to be a tacit understanding between the club’s staff and clientele that, so long as partygoers make a credible effort to hide their drug use in toilet stalls and darkened corners, the security personnel will not sanction or eject them. (Garcia, 116)

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Darkness is the hug of shortened vision. It fills blind spots that dot the corners of people’s attention. People in the dark are filled with presence, but it is not to be seen. And it is in the darkness that the partygoers Garcia describes stumble across the license to engage in activities for which they would otherwise face social or legal repercussions.

Events [Tripartite structure] People experience the dance music events that inform Garcia’s writing as serial. That is, for Garcia, dance music events are always a part of a longer night that is made up of series of events, including the approach and retreat from the event.

… there is generally a tripartite structure to a night out in all three cities: the EDM event itself, the preparations and/or festivities that take place beforehand, and the activities that take place afterwards. (Garcia, 74)

Dance music events are not singular or objective occurrences with identifiable definitions, clear beginnings and endings. They are series of events that end up carrying weight with regard to the effects, memories, and relationships they engender in attendees.

Attendance at the main party is the only truly essential part of a night out—it is certainly not uncommon for partygoers to attend only the main EDM event and then return home without a detour—but, for most of my contacts in all three cities, the pre-party and the afterparty are both important elements in their idealized narratives of a “good,” “full,” or “successful” night out partying. Each phase of a night out is buttressed by transitional phases, particularly by periods of mobility between one site and another. Thus, a broader notion of what makes a night out would also include activities such as leaving home, going to the (pre- /after)party, waiting in the queue, going between parties, leaving the (pre- /after)party, and returning home. (Garcia, 75-76)

Experiences, relationships, and recollections spill out of the main party into the material relations of that event to other events. Trains, queues, and ways home are all crucial to consider when thinking through experiences typical of dance music events, such as intimacy.

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Sociotheoretical Work Not Considered Under the microscopes of cultural and social theorists, dance music events prove to be fruitful sites for investigating contemporary identities and social relations. This situation is affirmed again by the presence of the online peer reviewed journal Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture that has been publishing issues at least annually since 2009. Each issue is composed of three to five peer reviewed articles, a few shorter and less formal pieces, reviews of publications and films, interviews, and a mix of other types of writing. The journal’s website also directs readers and thinkers to the “Dancecult Research Network” which declares a mission statement and hosts indices of researchers, as well as various text and web-based resources. As a member of the “Radical Open Access Collective”, all Dancecult issues are available online at no cost.

Dancecult is a peer-reviewed, open-access e-journal for the study of electronic dance music culture (EDMC). A platform for interdisciplinary scholarship on the shifting terrain of EDMCs worldwide, the journal houses research exploring the sites, technologies, sounds and cultures of electronic music in historical and contemporary perspectives. Playing host to studies of emergent forms of electronic music production, performance, distribution, and reception, as a portal for cutting-edge research on the relation between bodies, technologies, and cyberspace, as a medium through which the cultural politics of dance is critically investigated, and as a venue for innovative multimedia projects, Dancecult is the forum for research on EDMCs. (From “About” section on website)16

In 2021, Dancecult will host a virtual conference and, for the first time, gather as a community. In a peculiar turn of events, the virtual conferencing technologies that spread during the COVID-19 shutdown facilitate this gathering.

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1.4: Memoirs

The writings surveyed so far in this movement result when dance music events meet people who write, triggering writerly instincts. Sometimes, however, people are involved intimately and intentionally in dance music events prior to being writers. This section studies a memoir to investigate how writings can take place in dance music events, to complement studies of how dance music events take place in writings, by studying the writing of a touring artist who performs at dance music events.

Uproot: Travels in 21st-Century Music and Digital Culture Jace Clayton, an international touring DJ since 2000, collects his thoughts in his 2016 book entitled Uproot: Travels in 21st-Century Music and Digital Culture. The writing details some of his experiences performing in more than thirty countries. Clayton’s big break comes when a mix he publishes online for his friends gains viral internet attention and sees hundreds of thousands of downloads across the globe.17 This web-based notoriety catapults Clayton (who also goes by the artist name DJ Rupture) into a career in the entertainment industry. With the perspectives of a DJ, he offers reflections on music industries global and local, notable technological developments over the course of his career, the social functions of music, and the philosophical provocations of dance music events. Readers gain an intimate look at the professional relations that produce many dance music events, and they gain an appreciation for intertwined and global flows of music, digital media technologies, and capital. An early passage from Uproot traverses all six reading themes and is worth excerpting at length. Clayton describes for readers the environment at Boston’s underground dance music events at the turn to the 21st Century, and quickly incorporates all six of this dissertation’s reading themes for illustrative assistance.

Events [Formative]

17 Gold Teeth Thief by DJ Rupture . 112

Clayton introduces the passage with a bold declaration about the formative significance of those early dance music events for his eventual career.

And I wouldn’t be a musician if it weren’t for nights spent on the dance floor of an after-hours club in Boston called the Loft. (Clayton, 10)

Uproot is ostensibly about contemporary music and cultures and the unprecedented economic conditions which condition their variable conceptions, transmissions, and receptions. But the book begins with a familiar story: person attends dance music events, person is inspired towards becomings musical.

Materiality of Sound and Dancing [Embodying sounds] Some of this inspiration is, literally, sensational. It is related to sensory feelings that ensue when people are submerged in low frequency vibrations, and it is embodied when people move in participatory collaboration with those vibrations.

... I remember feeling submerged in bass lines, blubbery and whaleish, rolled around the room. Sonic activity in the mid-range frequencies was often sparse, stepped back to let the low and high ends of the spectrum hit with maximum impact and clarity. Unpredictable kick-and-snare combinations skittered high above the bass, programmed into machine-gone-wild levels of complexity, at twice the tempo. This meant that the dancers could choose which rhythmic time frame to follow: the busy percussion (the speed of fast techno) or the half-time bass line (the speed of hip-hop). Mostly we did our best to embody both dynamics, fast and slow, in acknowledgment that this new music was asking us to move in new ways. (Clayton, 11)

In this passage, Clayton describes how the materiality of sound, polyrhythms, and dancing are part of the same movements and the same serial events.

Darkness, Ineffability [Nothing to watch] And darkness is also connected to these sounds, movements, and events, especially in its effects of limiting vision and intensifying immersive sounds and kinesthetic movements.

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During all of this the DJs were nowhere to be seen. Surely they must have been tucked away in some booth somewhere. I never bothered to look for them. It was dark, and who wants to be a wallflower? And what was there to watch even if we found them? The focus was on the sound, as activated by us dancers. We didn’t need a figurehead onstage pulling in our attention. We were what was happening. (Clayton, 11)

Although events depend in many capacities on DJs, they also often enact the deemphasis of the visibility of musical performers. For Clayton, sometimes art should be heard, not seen.

Critique [Gallery arts vs. DJ’d music] Clayton draws these experiences into a critique of gallery arts, specifically in that they prioritize visibility and the idealization of the art object. For Clayton, installations that fail to offer participation are lagging behind DIY aesthetic projects in the register of those that succeed at the Loft.

Those late nights at the Loft taught me never to take an audience for granted. It’s not something that just materializes and passively consumes your creation. Especially in the visual arts, there’s a sense that an artist makes his or her work, installs it in a gallery, and that’s it. Little consideration is given to who’s going to see and how they might engage with it. Whereas up in the Loft, engagement with the audience was everything: the crowd responded to the energy of the mix, and the DJs fed off that, creating a tight feedback loop. The audience became a form of intelligence and expression in and of itself. The people in the room were never entirely separate from the performers. (Clayton, 11-12)

This passage does not work to theorize or justify the reading themes, nor does it attempt to reconcile them to each other in ordered interactions. Instead, the themes are used to describe a scene, a formative time in Clayton’s development. Series of dark dance music events with loud music that is difficult to pin to its sources inspire Clayton towards his calling, towards his becoming the internationally touring DJ Rupture. With a balance of hopeful anecdotes and informed cynicism, the storytelling in Uproot prevents the reduction of musical relations – even those dominated by capital – to the economic relations that so persistently run through them. The materiality of sound 114 is, after all, powerful in different ways than economic infrastructures and political relations are powerful.

The thing that crosses the line between public and private is sound itself. Sound permeates walls, turning everyone’s interior space a bit more public. Listening connects the woman alone in her apartment with the social world outside it. If you can hear it, it’s happening right now. Nearby and in time for you to take action. Sound creates community even, and perhaps especially, when we don’t want it. (Clayton, 272)

People are immersed in the materiality of sound like they are immersed in political and economic infrastructures, and although these different immersive potentials interact, they are not reducible to each other.

Memoir Works Not Considered Laurent Garnier’s Electrochoc bears many similarities to Uproot, but Garnier commits more energy to describing his experience as a resident at specific clubs; he connects his experiences to several sociocultural climates and communities, whereas Clayton emphasizes a blur of cities that all begin to look the same. In Electrochoc, readers sink into details about the dynamics and drama of music economies in Manchester, Paris, and London and come to gain a different view of specific musical connections between specific musical communities.

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1.5 Musical Non-Fiction

Some writings about dance music events do not fit easily recognizable genres, but nonetheless do important literary work. These writings are not fictional, but they are similarly not preoccupied with any tasks of proving their point or substantiating their premises. This section surveys musical non-fictions that are continuations of dance music events, complements that seek to work with some of the same forces and intentions as dance music events, albeit textually. The transposition of musical energies that course through dance music events onto the page, into written energies, can take a variety of forms.

More Brilliant Than The Sun: Adventures In Sonic Fiction Kodwo Eshun is a music critic, philosopher, and social commentator who comes of intellectual age as dance music events meet amplified sound systems and popular access to home studio equipment.

Critique [Sonic fiction] In his book More Brilliant than the Sun, Eshun focuses on elaborating sonic fictions, which are connected to the often befuddling sense that rides along music in dance music events. Sonic fictions, like dance music events in general, are escapes from the aural necessities of the real world; they are made of textures, rhythms, and events, and sometimes even words. For Eshun, sonic fictions are to be found in pieces of music, but texts like More Brilliant than the Sun are also instances of sonic fiction.

Escapism is organized until it seizes the means of perception and multiplies the modes of sensory reality. Which is why you should always laugh in the face of those producers, djs and journalists who sneer at escapism for its unreality, for its fakeness; all those who strain to keep it real. These assumptions wish to clip your wings, to tie your forked tail to a tree, to handcuff you to the rotting remnants of tradition, the inherited stupidities of habit, the dead weight of yourself. Common sense wants to see you behind the bars it calls Real Life. 116

By contrast, Sonic Fiction strands you in the present with no way of getting back to the 70s. ... Sonic Fictions are part of modern music’s MythSystems. Moving through living space, real-world environments that are already alien. Operating instructions for the escape route from yourself. Overthrow the Internal Empire of your head. Secede from the stupidity of intelligence, the inertia of good taste, the rigor mortis of cool. You’re born into a rigged prison which the jailors term Real Life. Sonic Fiction is the manual for your own offworld break-out, reentry program, for entering Earth’s orbit and touching down on the landing strip of your senses. (Eshun, 103)

In addition to waxing thoroughly poetic, Eshun juxtaposes artists and brings forth interview material to transpose sonic fictions from dance music events into literary form. But some sonic fictions are already, in certain capacities (and conveniently for the purposes of this field survey), literary. Eshun studies instances of musicians including “label fictions” in their musical productions, specifically groups affiliated with Underground Resistance. Label fictions, as per Eshun, are short narratives that place music in a story, that give it an ethos or an atmosphere, that contribute to listener/reader immersions in sonic fictions. In some cases, label fictions refer to affiliated artists, groups, other label fictions, and events contemporary to releases. Eshun references three World Power Alliance records released in 1992 that bore the following text etched into the B-sides of their vinyl pressings.

The World Power Alliance was formed somewhere in Detroit, Michigan U.S.A. on May, 22, 1992 at 4:28pm by various elements of the world underground legions. The alliance is dedicated to the advancement of the human race by way of sonic experimentation. The World Power Alliance was designed to bring the worlds minds together, to combat the mediocre audio and visual programming being fed to the inhabitants of Earth, this programming is stagnating the minds of the people, building a wall between races and world peace. This wall must be destroyed, and it will fall. By using the untapped energy potential of sound, the W.P.A will smash this wall much the same as certain frequencies shatter the glass. Brothers of the underground, transmit your tones and frequencies from all location of this world and wreak havoc on the programmers. THIS IS WAR! LONG LIVE THE UNDERGROUND! (From listing on Discogs)18

18 Discogs.com is an online music marketplace that specializes in used vinyl. 117

World Power Alliance are affiliated with Underground Resistance, who work with sonic fictions on multiple occasions. (Readers hear from Matos in section 1.2 that UR published label fictions in defense of DJ Rolando’s “Knights of the Jaguar”.) Eshun reports that, in 1997, a Detroit group named Scan 7 prints the following narrative in the liner notes of their album Undetectable.

After Drexciya's successful seaborn assault on the mainland, a basstation is established by wavejumper commandos somewhere under the coast, allowing UR to continue the fierce ‘95 winter equinox assault on the programmers. Scan-7 specialist engineers now skillfully deploy the cloaking devices which will allow Trackmaster Lou and the Scan-7 ninja squad complete invisibility to programmer thermal sensitive radar. Trackmaster Lou's mission is to infiltrate the central broadcast facility and knockout the mind control beam which telecast's the programmers’ agendas daily to millions of uninformed humans worldwide. Once the beam is knocked out Trackmaster Lou will then install into the programmers’ mainframe the new CPU platform chip developed in Detroit by Metroplex engineers named 'Electro - 3132030UR033'. This chip will immediately induce viruses and bass frequencies designed to destroy programmer chips in broadcast facilities worldwide. This will provide humanity an opportunity to clear their minds and prepare for the upcoming electric storms of the spring-summer equinox. With the help of key hackers worldwide, Trackmaster Lou and the Scan- 7 ninjas will be digitized and returned back to Detroit via the internet sometime in early April undetected. You have been warned. (In comment section of Discogs listing)19

The music and dance music events Eshun writes about aim to reprogram people to alternative states of consciousness, alternatives to the consciousness options distributed by dominant infrastructure. Here in these alternatives there is little in the way of reliable reality; consciousness is all caught up with machines in the production of various worlds, many of which clamor for attention or preeminence. For Underground Resistance via Eshun, clearing the broadcast airwaves of the programmers’ corrupt signals is tantamount to clearing the mind.

Materiality of Sound [Nervous systems and X-102] Sonic fictions rest heavily in the sounds to which they correspond, usually at dance

19 118 music events. Most people who hear sonic fictions in the form of music are not in those moments holding a sleeve of a vinyl record, replete with notes and information, in their hands. Most people hear the sounds of sonic fictions at dance music events while dancing, while mixing with a crowd and with themselves as crowds.

Music is the science of playing human nervous systems, orchestrating sensory mixes of electric emotions …. (Eshun, 161)

Eshun checks in with Sun Ra and the Arkestra to make this point explicit. According to Eshun, Ra’s musical mythologies hold listeners and performers together in common vibrations that commonly inform all listeners’ personal experiences.

The crowd is an instrument played by electronics, and Ra is an instrument played by the Cosmos. The crowd is synthesized into a new state by electronics. Sinewaves pass through the medium of the synthesizer, amplification travels through the Arkestra’s instruments, through the crowd and then back, in an alternating sonotronic circuit. Dances correspond to constellations, each one a positioning satellite in a navigational astronomy. (Eshun, 161)

Musicians, dancers, musical instruments and stars are all run through by vibrations, by music that is moving somewhere and back again and somewhere else, that explores the atomic as well as the interstellar. This sciencey imagery that places people and the night sky in music connects to another interstellar image covered in Adventures in Sonic Fiction: an alien spacecraft exploring Saturn’s atmosphere and rings. For Eshun, X-102’s Discovers the Rings of Saturn is a complete instance of sonic fiction.20 As X-102’s spaceship traverses Saturn’s atmosphere, listeners encounter tracks named for Saturn’s moons and rings before landing on the surface of the planet in the final track on the album, “Groundzero (The Planet)”. Jeff Mills, the main artist behind Discovers the Rings of Saturn, describes the process of materializing the concept of the dance music.

How long a track should be was dictated by how wide the ring actually was on Saturn. What the rings were made out of determined the texture of the track. The way they were sequenced was linked to the concept and the colour of the artwork is very similar to what it really looks like. (Jeff Mills in Eshun, 135)

20 Discovers the Rings of Saturn by X-102: . 119

Furthermore, tracks on X-102’s record are separated by locked grooves in the surface of the record whose measurements correspond to the proportions of Saturn’s rings. The materiality of sound surfaces in this record in multiple registers: music is the physical grooves on a phonograph record; music is not entirely distinguishable from the visual aesthetics of its presentation; music is made of the same stuff and information as planets, atmospheric rings, and stars. For Eshun as for Mills, Discovers the Rings of Saturn also maintains a material relationship to the concepts that inspire it.

Sleeve art, titles, label art, everything out in the open and yet powerfully unclear. The concept album, Jeff Mills argues, should ‘materialize an idea or a theory, to try to explain with music a certain place or a certain thing.’ (Eshun, 132)

This task of “collapsing concept into matter, and the mental into the material” is an identifying feature of sonic fiction (Eshun, 136). Sonic fiction and dance music events engage people’s imaginations without allowing them the luxury of stepping away from the ideas in which it is implicated. Listeners are inside sound in ways that readers are not inside text. Sonic fictions extend beyond the reach of novels and spill out of the realm of ideas into the material of fluctuating air pressures. For Eshun, sonic fictions exist before and without readers or listeners; they are not human.

X-102 shouldn’t even be here, on your decks. It’s a piece of another planet manufactured on earth. An off-world artefact engineered by X-102, an alien artefact materialized in Detroit …. (Eshun, 135)

Sonic fictions, and by implication dance music events, are not real because they know the real better than it knows itself. According to Eshun, both exploit material that does not recognize itself as material, bringing it into dance step with its multiple relations.

The concept has merged with its surface. Simultaneously all concepts hide in the record, recessed, submerged, demanding that you sink through the dimensions of matter before decompressing up through the grooves. X-102 switches on, phaseshifts from inert plastic into a kinaesthetic command engine. (Eshun, 136)

Like a plasma, the properties of the materiality of the sound on Discovers the Rings of Saturn remain in flux; astral dust is vinyl is the rearranging of air molecules by waves. 120

Dancing [Acclimate to reprogramming]

Sound snatches you into the skin you’re in, abducts you into your own body, activates the bio-logic of thought, encourages your organs to revolt from hierarchy. (Eshun, 149)

As sonic fictions obliterate the viability of objective realities, alienation becomes a condition at dance music events, and people’s transcendental subjectivities separate from their bodies and dissipate. But alienation is not an impassive, inert, or consistent condition. Alienation strikes bodies, minds, crowds, and populations in many ways, and some of them join in the strike by dancing.

Instead of resisting alien extraction, dancing turns it into a gift, turns onto the joy of being abducted. (Eshun, 140)

Eshun boogies amongst realities and fictions at dance music events, swaying between multiplying personalities, juking and jacking with sounds that catapult dancers from their present to an out-of-time where time is a pattern of waves. This dance into alienation offers revolution, but seldom resolution.21

The feet that move, the hips which swivel in time, the head which nods, the nerves which pulse: all the body counts. To get funked up is to acclimatize yourself to the endless complexificaiton of these states, to be sensualized by all the processes that process you. (Eshun, 152)

Sonic fiction does not finish people with alienation; it gets their bodies moving at dance music events. For the fictive is not always fake; it is just unreal like spontaneous coordinations in the movement of a dancing crowd.

Darkness [Darkside] Darkness, for Eshun, involves forces that impose themselves on people. But this is different from The Programmer’s Agenda. Darkness is connected to forces distinct from

21 Here, Eshun is close to the image that closes the 1966 film The Battle of Algiers. As the French announce their surrender to Algerian demands of decolonization, a smiling woman dances to drums, dancing into the future and away from the colonial subjectivity theorized by Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth. 121 social or governmental power relations, and the media cannot approach it. But certain music does approach these forces, and upon exposure to such music (at dance music events, for example), people realize that social and governmental powers cower in the shadows of the dark powers that already live inside people.

No government can scare you … because E, trips, hydroponically grown skunk, all these have already scared you more than they ever could. This sense of being snatched by drugs, of being kidnapped into your head, of drawing out the madness already in you: this is what the Darkside is. Everything the media warns you against has already been made into tracks that drive the dancefloor. (Eshun, 96)

Darkness resists delineation, but not experience. It is a human feature before authority can ever warn against it. Darkness at dance music events does not concern itself with any commercial media or popular success. This darkness seeks, rather, further communion with those deep rumblings that cannot be captured in photographs or in headlines.

Detroit Techno is so absent from American popculture, so contra-media, that it slips from the scanning systems altogether. Like an Argentinian refusenik, it’s been disappeared. Except that instead of pleading for inclusion and integration, it moves further into the dark. (Eshun, 116)

For Eshun, darkness is that which lies beyond the comprehension of society and within the creative energies engaged during people’s unintegrated experiences.

Ineffability [I is a crowd] Eshun follows several artists through mazes of pseudonyms and multiplying identities corresponding to divergent artistic approaches, imaginary characters, and different selves that are nonetheless sometimes bound up in a single person. Encountering Kool Keith’s multiple artist personalities, Eshun discovers the viability of a schizoanalytic frame for appreciating the multiplicity of certain musical personalities.

Instead of putting the scientific self back together or mending the broken fragments of the cybernetic psyche, Kool Keith heightens what used to be called schizophrenia, intensifies the crackup and the breakdown. The self doesn’t split 122

up or multiply into heteronyms. Rather, the self no longer amputates itself down to a single part but instead asserts that I is a crowd, that the human is a population of processes. Multiple personality is no syndrome or disorder but a relaxation, a giving into rather than a fighting against the brain as a society of mind. The brain is a society of mind with no one driving. The head isn’t the Kommand Kontrol Centre of the body. There is no one processing agency, intelligence isn’t central and everyone hears voices talking in their heads all the time. … What used to be called alteregos are now multi-egos, a crowd of synthetic objects. (Eshun, 27)

Eshun does not care whether Kool Keith studies Anti-Oedipus or intentionally incorporates the text into his performances at musical events. Rather, Eshun gestures towards an obvious alignment between musical experiments that encourage pseudonymous creativity and the philosophical worlds imagined by the poststructuralists. In this alignment, Eshun seeks precedents for dancing into his splintering subjectivity. There is no hope for the consolidation of a new, old, or true self. And there is no desire for it either.

The unified self is an amputated self. (Eshun, 38)

Events [Series] Deleuzian themes continue as Eshun incorporates serial events into his writing. For example: any given dance music event at the end of the century is an agglomeration of much more than itself. Dance music events are always series of things that comprise psychedelic techniques, musical energies, and cultural sentiments that are related to each other by undergirding senses.

The End of Century dancefloor is a series of paradoxical psychedelias that induce immersive inversions and fleeting reversions. The phuture is a series of synthetic sensations, artificial emotions, tense presents. (Eshun, 99)

At End of Century dance music events, the future takes place with every beat, not one beat at a time. Eshun puts this theory into experimental practice by deconstructing the origin story of techno music as a genre, which traditionally claims mid-1980s Detroit as its 123 birthplace and the band Kraftwerk as its primary influence. In lieu of this classic and accepted history, Eshun suggests that Herbie Hancock’s 1974 song “Nobu” is “Techno before the event” (Eshun, 11). In “Nobu”, Hancock jams on electric keys while a synthesizer riffs through a percussive sequence that continually shifts as it meets interloping oscillators and filters. Although somewhat obscure, Eshun’s move is audacious. He challenges not only the historians but also the artists who claim to be progenitors and arbiters of techno themselves, pushing those artists to think more experimentally about their influences. For Eshun, the influences that traverse music and tie together different sounds and events are not only heard; these influences are the stuff in which people are submerged. A genre cannot, therefore, be reduced to the straight and narrow lines that historians draw through musical influence and different times. Sonic fictions are not beholden to the patterns in which they appear to people.

Rhythm Science (2004)

Frankly, by the start of the twenty-first century, the academy is such a reflection of class structure and hierarchy that it tends to cloud any real progressive contexts of criticism and discourse. By Dj-ing, making art, and writing simultaneously, I tried to bypass the notion of the critic as an authority who controls narrative …. (Miller, 48)

Paul Miller, also known as DJ Spooky a.k.a. That Subliminal Kid, includes a mix CD with his manifesto Rhythm Science. Each track on the mix is a blend of multiple recordings; groovy drums swing together vocal samples and whoosing static and musical snippets. Ambient bleeps and bloops are crossed with the grunts of unidentified animals are soaked in reverb and spread out around tickling rimshots and hihats and submerged in what sound like fog horns. Early on, the voice of Artaud blends with those swinging drums and a meditative bassline, and is subjected to echo effects, before giving way to hip hop records that DJ Spooky remixes by scratching. A sitar ponders over sped up bongos while a stray hihat keeps more reasonable time in the high frequencies. 124

In addition to being the title of the writing, rhythm science is a specific creative technique, according to DJ Spooky.

It’s a game that asks, “Who speaks through you?” (Miller, 77)

These words are enlarged on a two-page spread across pages 114-115, on a light green background that is made up partially of a vertical American flag in green and white, punctuated by blurry renderings of a couple flying saucers. This mix of symbols, and the others that scatter Rhythm Science, should not clarify theses so much as trigger realizations for the reader.

Rhythm science is not about “transparency” of intent. Rhythm science is a forensic investigation of sound as a vector of coded language that goes from the physical to the informational and back again. (Miller, 4-5)

Ineffability [Mix culture] DJ Spooky connects rhythm science to DJing to writing; he deploys these techniques to mix media, to immerse people in the statements he hopes to make and communicate. For DJ Spooky, a DJ mix is an externalization of his own alchemical processing of his environment.

If I internalize the environment around me, who is going to control how the information eventually resurfaces? It’s an uncanny situation; the creative act [performing a mix] becomes a dispersion of self. Back in the day, it was called alchemy, but in the hyperfluid environment of information culture, we simply call it the mix. (Miller, 29)

This mixing as contemporary transubstantiation of environment into sound is not only the activity of the DJ. It is also, in Rhythm Science, a distinct type of culture.

Mix culture, with its emphasis on exchange and nomadism, serves as a precedent for the hypertextual conceits that later arrived from the realms of the academy. … Phono/graph means sound/writing and in an era of rhythm science both serve as recursive aspects of information collage where everything from personal identity to the codes used to create art or music are available to the mix. It’s that simple and it’s that complex. (Miller, 64)

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People mix information from their environments and relations with others until those influences surface in sound and writing. Mixed sounds and writings bear multiplicity as their mark, and they signal the unspeakable surplus of influences that course through people, and connect them to each other and their environments. According to DJ Spooky, a recognition of the multiplying relations between self and environment are a dance music event culture before they are an academic priority.

Critique [Effect of mixing] When done correctly, that is, when DJs do a good job of channeling environmental and social influences in sounds, mixing can serve acute critical functions.

Djing for me, like science fiction, points us to a place where everything doesn’t have to be the same. (Miller, 20)

DJ Spooky discusses the critical project that one of his specific albums is. ILLbient is rooted in a critique of the culture scenes of New York City, and this includes dance music events (Miller, 49).

ILLbient started out as a critique of conservatisms in the NYC music scene. Everyone from the artists to the promoters to the critics were all about “orthodoxy.” But keeping the boundaries between music styles in a world of total flux seemed crazy to me, and I wanted to figure out a way to flip things so that people could check the vibe. … In any case, the nineties were different from the sixties, the notion of the avant garde was becoming obsolete. People simply wanted to get paid, figure out different ways to create a forum for their zone to flow, and then leave it at that. … ILLbient was about preventing the outside world from crushing you with media bombardment, creating more active approaches to using the sonic and image archives in which we are immersed. (Miller, 48)

Materiality of Sound [Gravity and sound] Rhythm Science conflates balance and hearing by reminding readers how their senses of both are connected to the structures of their inner ears.

The basic structure is the basilar membrane of the ear. The sense of gravity and balance that we have comes from there, and the frequencies that we can or cannot respond to come from there, too. Beyond that, I’ve always been an optimist – I don’t think we’ve engaged how much we can hear. (Miller, 17) 126

The ear hears more than people normally engage, and this hearing is caught up in the processing of more than sound. Who can really say all the ways people connect to the materiality of their surrounds with their ears?

Dancing [Drift of meaning] For DJ Spooky, people are not inclined to process or speak about the sounds in which they are submerged. Perhaps this is because the dance of sound is not something that people are capable of explaining, so much as something that people might join in.

Sound. Think of it as a dance of neologisms, an anemic cinema for the genesplice generation where sign and symbol, word and meaning all drift into the sonic maelstrom. (Miller, 5)

Dance is motion that characterizes the worlds in which people live, and that people do not systemize as meanings. In Rhythm Science, dance is the drift and the movement of meanings.

Darkness [Dark bodies and multiplex consciousness] Similar ideas of ongoing chaotic motion pervade DJ Spooky’s use of darkness when quoting W. E. B. Du Bois on his theory of the double consciousness.

… Du Bois wrote of the African American condition, we are faced with “a world which yields… no true self consciousness, but only lets [us] see [ourselves] through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double consciousness, this sense of always looking at oneself through the eyes of others…one ever feels his two-ness – an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings, two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.” (Miller, 61)

Here, darkness and double consciousness both refer to characteristics specific to the bodies of black people in the US. For Du Bois, this multiple consciousness marks the suffering of black people in the US, but DJ Spooky consults Charles Mingus for an alternative perspective on the potential of a tripartite consciousness tied to dark bodies. He then pushes beyond even Mingus.

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Jazz great Charles Mingus moved beyond Du Bois’ dualities at the beginning of his autobiography, Beneath the Underdog, to a form of triple consciousness: “In other words, I am three. One man stands forever in the middle, unconcerned, unmoved, watching, waiting to be allowed to express what he sees to the other two.” ... Where Du BOis saw duality and Mingus imagined a trinity, I would say the twenty-first-century self is so fully immersed in and defined by the data that surrounds it, we are entering an era of multiplex consciousness. (Miller, 61)

The emergence of multiplex consciousnesses in dark bodies, in Rhythm Science, is a result of the horrors to which the social infrastructure and so many people in the US subject black people. The 20th Century marks the continued development of this thesis, and of the relevant contributions musical thinking makes to theories of consciousness and identity.

Events [Time]

It’s all about how we play with perception of events, and this is the link that I make between Dj culture, techno-science, and the art of everyday creativity in a digital environment. (Miller, 13 and 16)

Paul Kammerer, a Victorian era biologist as DJ Spooky describes him, has the right idea about time.

He was the first person to really explore ideas of synchronicity: the ways in which things, actions, and events converge in time. Kammerer would move through his environment collecting examples of simultaneity, marking and registering coincidences with mathematical precision. He searched long and hard for an equation that would describe how things manifested in urban reality, a “law of sequences” (which parallels, of course, how we refer to the elements in a music track these days). (Miller, 13)

DJ Spooky highlights parallels between Kammerer’s understanding of modern urban time and DJ Spooky’s own understanding of musical time typical of contemporary dance music. Sequences, in both senses, are series that structure and repeat throughout a track. Sequences are patterns of different sounds that bear rhythmic relations to each other and to the parameters that condition them. And sequences are repetitive, but they change as musicians introduces various effects to them. 128

Musical Nonfiction Not Considered In Chance: the catalogue, editors Sarah Gavlak and Chris Kraus gather writings from poets, musicians, artists, gamblers, philosophers, and novelists who participate in a music and culture conference called Chance in 1996. Chance is loosely conceived as an excuse to get Jean Baudrillard to a casino named Whiskey Pete’s in not-quite Las Vegas in 1996 (in something of death knell for postmodernism in the US). Chance includes a submission from DJ Spooky (who also performs at the conference), interviews with event artists and attendees, some photographs, and certainly much more for people who can connect it to the event in their memories. A second instance of left behind musical writing is more difficult to pin down to a single author, or even to the audacity of a thesis. Cyberpositive, composed by a group calling themselves o(rphan)d(rift>), intersperses page-long sequences of binary code with apocalyptic mantras and ecstatic visions from dance music events. o(rphan)d(rift>) is originally affiliated with the now defunct Cybernetic Culture Research Center at Warwick University. They publish Cyberpositive in 1995 as a complement to audiovisual performances they are staging at the time, and it is as much a daunting example of the aesthetics of 1990s futurism as it is a text about dance music events.

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1.6 Zines

Zines are a popular format of print production in many grassroots art communities. They are often small, folded pamphlets bound with string or staples, printed in small runs, and exchanged hand-to-hand. This movement privileges one zine in particular to connect the conversations at play in mass publications to the conversations at play in specific dance music events, namely, dance music events in the Twin Cities.

Destroyed Apples Magazine Destroyed Apples Magazine is a Twin Cities zine that focuses on local dance music events. Messages on the back of Editions 0 and 1 bear a clear description of the mission and priorities of the zine.

This is an independently produced and locally supported publication dedicated to artfully presenting electronic music culture from the greater Minneapolis area. Each addition includes exclusive releases not available by any other means from a local music artist, thereby making it an imprint music label. (Destroyed Apples Magazine: Edition 0 & 1, 12)

There are three different types of Destroyed Apples Magazine editions: Main, Core, and Memes to an End. Main editions revolve around themes or artists; Core editions cover events; and Memes to an End editions offer readers a collage to view alongside a mix. All editions are twelve 5.5” X 9” pages long, except for Memes to an End, which contain larger 9” X 11” pages for a more immersive visual experience. Every edition also features music that can only be downloaded with a code from a hardcopy of the edition. These exclusive tracks and mixes usually correspond to the event or artist featured in each respective edition. And at last, in studying this final piece of writing about dance music events, readers will encounter dance music events in the Twin Cities: Fractal Geometry, Deeper, and Freak Of The Week.

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Critique [Twin Cities wealth] Destroyed Apples finds its initial impetus and ongoing purpose in a lack. Edition 0 (2019) takes issue with the inexplicable lack of interest in dance music events shown by Twin Cities establishments.

Counterintuitively, little attention is given by local media outlets who might generate considerable credence to the plethora of local acts looking to access a public base whom might aid in supporting established and emerging projects. One has to question if it is a lack of interest by the public or a lack of mediation. Additionally, considering the size of Minneapolis, there are far too few venues willing to invest longterm in the genius of the local electronic music scene and create a reliable home for forum to convene and public to converge. The assertion is that local media and most venues are, save for a few, doing a disservice to both the public and the artistry presently available by catering primarily to large, commercially motivated, and touring acts. An artist would have essentially had to have already been well-known in order to receive attention from a media publication and this egregiously understates the value of that local wealth given the ability for media attention to enhance and deepen the relationships that are indisputably adjacent. (Destroyed Apples Magazine: Edition 0, 3)22

According to this voice, well established local venues and media outlets should take the initiative to make the Twin Cities more musical. They should invest in local economies that use art to challenge expectations of how a product should be produced, exchanged, and consumed.

Materiality of Sound [Vibration relations] Later in Edition 0, criticism is left aside for constructive, socially oriented philosophizing that considers the materiality of sound in its ubiquitous vibrations. In this passage, sound and music are the materiality of relations between people.

Music is essentially coordinated sound. The sounds one hears are the geometry, texture, and density of the creators’ emotions; A curation, generated of its scope, color, magnitude and plasticity. These sonic weavings protrude, intersect, serenade, and physically vibrate one’s body, and when groups come together to feel this, it is no wonder that they feel quite literally in tune, harmonized with one another. (Destroyed Apples Magazine: Edition 0, 10)

22 This dissertation treats the title page of all editions of Destroyed Apples Magazine as page 1. 131

Social relations, people’s relationships, are materialized in the vibrations of air molecules in which they swim. Edition 0’s corresponding music is contributed by Parkour Master Battle Den. The four downloadable tracks are all electronic music, but they all dance in different ways. Some meditate on syncopated bass grooves, others pad meandering melodies with airy synthesizer chords. All feature stripped down beats, usually in service of a tight four-to-the-floor kick drum. These tracks aren’t reverb-shy, by any means; washed-out samples warble rhythmic vocal textures without offering much in the way of recognizable words. Together, the four tracks invoke a place where strange sounds bounce around, and exchange influence with each other – a musical economy of sorts.

Events [Core editions] Destroyed Apples Magazine Core editions all feature a brief description on their final pages.

CORE is a subseries of D.A.M. which highlights recurring series and events that give Minneapolis its pulse (Destroyed Apples Magazine: Core Edition 1 & 2 & 3).

The first Core edition covers an event called Fractal Geometry. It presents conversations with Shane French, James Allen Graham, and Zach Michels, who organize and promote the event. Fractal Geometry has been running since 2018, and it now takes place the last Sunday of every month at the Kitty Cat Klub in Dinkytown, Minneapolis. Not necessarily a DJ night, Fractal Geometry seeks out electronic musicians who experiment with their performance technologies.

I’ve not seen a single person approach their art the same way. Everybody’s using old gear, new gear, stuff they built themselves. (Zach Michels in Destroyed Apples Magazine: Core Edition 1, 5)

Different colors code text blocks to signal the three different speakers so the edition reads like a chat amongst colleagues about their event. They describe it as a continuation of an experimental attitude that characterizes Twin Cities artists’ musical relationships with sound production technologies. 132

There’s always been a solid dance scene in town, also a really solid noise scene. But there’s sooooo much material by artists known and unknown that’s somewhere in between and defies real classification. Everyone is a renaissance artist these days. The technology has advanced by leaps and bounds. Every culture is its time. Simply involving yourself in the negotiation of culture, contributing, you’re advancing what it was, is, and is going to be. Fractal Geometry doesn’t try to rehash something that’s dead and gone, but time goes by and what withstands the test of time deserves not only remembrance but embellishment. (James Allen Graham in Destroyed Apples Magazine: Core Edition 1, 5)

There are two music files that Core Edition 1 readers can download, one attributed to each of the performer monikers of Shane French and James Allen Graham (Lies from the Wolf and Timmy the Tapeworm). These two tracks are all electronic production. The first is ponderous, never panicked, while the second charges for twenty minutes on a fast kickdrum that crackles with every hit, as if it is recorded in a frying pan. It eventually deconstructs itself down to noise before eventually returning to and concluding with glitchy rhythms. The second Core edition of Destroyed Apples covers Deeper.

Deeper is a monthly dance night which takes place the last Thursday of every month @ The Red Room on the Loring Pasta Bar’s 2nd level. (Destroyed Apples Magazine: Core Edition 2, 2)

This edition also features a conversation with the three promoters of the event, Angelica, DJ SBC, and Video Violence. It also uses color coding technique to indicate each of their different voices. And although these three are open to performers using all sorts of techniques, they are adamant about using dance music events to express and realize their own musical desires.

It’s really a party for us but we’re very grateful that there are others who share in the same tastes that we have and show up regularly. (Video Violence in Destroyed Apples Magazine: Core Edition 2, 2)

These three promoters combine their different skills (DJing, VJing, flyer design) to achieve a dance music event series that allows the three of them to party exactly the 133 way they want. Deeper, the event itself, is the project, more than it is an opportunity to showcase particular performers (but it is that as well).

We go to a lot of electronic shows, we like to go out dancing, and wanted to develop a platform of our own because no one was playing the kind of music that we wanted to listen to on a regular basis. (Video Violence in Destroyed Apples Magazine: Core Edition 2, 2)

Deeper is the materialization of a formidable friendship in the form of dance music events.

Quite a bit of what we do is rooted in us being friends and having fun. (DJ SBC in Destroyed Apples: Core Edition 2, 2)

Page 11 contains a list of past performers at Deeper. It is heavy on Twin Cities artists; Heckadecimal, Niki Kitz, Lonefront, God’s Drugs, and mount curve are just some of the local names that crop up. Some people feature multiple times under multiple pseudonyms. For example: Ian Lehman, doubt, and EECEE are three different musicians who occupy the list, but they are all the same person. The music that this edition offers for download is a live mix by Angelica. Lasting around twenty six minutes, Angelica offers snippets of her deep, dark sounds in celebration of two years of Deeper. Kick drums fill the background but never stomp to the front, while coy hihats syncopate any square head bobbing to which the music might draw listeners. The third Core edition chats with DJ Nola about her funk and disco event, Freak of the Week. She echoes Video Violence and DJ SBC in describing how she promotes this event to be able to party exactly how she wants.

This format affords me the ability to do what I REALLY want to do which is dance and party. (DJ Nola in Destroyed Apples: Core Edition 3, 3)

Again, a dance music event series is a mode of expression, a creative product of a person or a group of people. 134

Destroyed Apples Magazine Core editions repeat this message to lead readers to appreciate dance music event series in the Twin Cities as pieces of art, and promoters as artists. They show how over and over again, people attend dance music events and become inspired to create their own versions. Core editions show that, much like the cores of even the most destroyed apples, dance music events contain the seeds of their own propagation.

Dancing [DJ Nola] DJ Nola emphasizes dancing repeatedly. She reminisces about one event in particular that sticks in her heart because of the excellent dancing crowd.

I just love watching people dance. Especially this last holiday party we did. For some reason, everybody did that right. There were no flies on the wall and there wasn’t a moment where the majority of people weren’t carrying it out on the dance floor. It appeals to a crowd of people who know they want to move. (DJ Nola in Destroyed Apples: Core Edition 3, 9)

According to DJ Nola’s preferences, whatever it is that different people at a dance music event might be carrying out, they would carry it out best on the dance floor. The downloadable music that accompanies this edition is an hour-long mix by DJ Nola. It starts with funky, horn-heavy boogie music and moves through disco and late Motown feels to a nostalgic dance floor from an era when progressive, future oriented drum sounds first meet musical soul trying to find a home in a new genre during the late 1970s and early 1980s. This mix has the warm character of an all-vinyl set.

Darkness [Nightline] Darkness features prominently in the second main edition of Destroyed Apples Magazine, subtitled Nightline. In two essays, this edition meditates on the politics of dance music evens that take place at night.

Under the blanket of darkness, the mind is significant in and of itself. Whether awake or asleep, the mind is working in the dark. (Destroyed Apples Magazine: Edition 2, 9)

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This issue conveys two different meanings of darkness. First, it critiques policies and mentalities that reduce dance music events to intoxicated aberrations requiring policing and prohibitions because they are linked to illegal drug use by their concomitant darknesses.

Music is a common reason for groups of people to congregate and often intersects with conditions that governments find concerning. The relationships of drug use and music, so commonly mediated as ‘negative’, aggravates the extent to how laws manifest regarding larger groups of people communing in noncommercial environments. (Destroyed Apples Magazine: Edition 2, 7)

Antagonism against the dangerous darkness of the night and the continued extension of the light of the day are the business of societal structures. These structures seek to extend themselves until “even by closing one’s eyes, the sun never sets” (Destroyed Apples: Edition 2, 8).

Laws, Rules, and Restrictions. Codes, Ordinances, and Strictures. These are the spotlights of groups of minds systematically conspiring to create societal confines which are to be imposed on the mind and made example on the body. It takes but only a handful of individuals to set in motion legal proceedings that in essence, make listening and dancing illegal again because of the substances that are suspected, not even seen, to be there. To not be visible or to not make intentions visible is criminalized. (Destroyed Apples Magazine: Edition 2, 8)

A photograph of the Presidio Modelo sits at the bottom of the page, lending visual aid to theoretical maneuvers.

Light deterministically locks an individual into a static form and place. The sun itself becomes a shameful insult to an individual’s autonomy. That isn’t altogether a contemporary treatise, but is perfectly represented in historical forms of punishment such as the Panopticon. Consider it [light] much as a prison in the round like a cathedral and multiple stories high with all cells side-by-side directed inward. At the center would have been a guard tower and a beacon. … A prisoner couldn’t tell if there was a single guard or multiple and they couldn’t determine if they were actively being observed. The conclusion of the prisoner would have inevitably been that they assume they are, at all times, being watched. (Destroyed Apples Magazine: Edition 2, 8)

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But Nightline encourages readers to have hope, for the light has not fully yet conquered the night. The sun still sets every day and changes the sociostructural conditions of the mind.

Under the blanket of darkness, the mind is significant in and of itself. Whether awake or asleep, the mind is working in the dark. (Destroyed Apples Magazine: Edition 2, 9)

Nightline proposes a switch to the preferred side of a binary circadian rhythm; it finds freedom in the night, freedom from the social and the harsh lights of constant measurements and prescriptions.

Nighttime, then, is about what is liberating of self and revealing what is concealed and forbidden. (Destroyed Apples Magazine: Edition 2, 6)

Consciousness in and of darkness is a negation of social structure, of the demands of daytime intelligibility, of the domination of the self by the self. Darkness, in Nightline, is a threat to efficacy of domination through surveillance.

The relationship of the night to the radical nature of community must obviously be such a threat to our current society that it would seem almost every effort has been set in place to constrain or collect upon the proclivity of the creative mind to perform revolutionary acts. … Nighttime and darkness, are not an absence of light. Rather, they are illicit substances that break down definitions, allow the mind to reach out, and inspire individuals to deeply connect. (Destroyed Apples Magazine: Edition 2, 9)

That is, darkness is only a threat to light that can’t do anything but shine and define. Darkness is only a threat to those who can’t tolerate belief in more than they can see. This edition includes five tracks for download. The first features charging, kick drums and ambiguous percussive sounds whose original source has likely disappeared and persists only as noisy scattering of a delay effect. Dissonance in the bassline flirts with resolution only to show that it knows exactly what and where it is. The second track meanders more peacefully across murmuring chords and hand claps that seem to stumble as they navigate without clear vision. The third track zooms around syncopated steel drums, the fourth track experiments with a single vocal sample for two and a half 137 minutes, and the fifth track leaves percussion entirely behind to follow overdriven chords as they shift, suspend, and resolve.

Ineffability [As The World Burns] The As The World Burns edition of the Memes to an End series of Destroyed Apples Magazine provides readers a browsing experience, not just something to read. Although it is made almost entirely of images, an inset on page 3 shows social media information, mailing address, and a few sentences.

This issue of D.A.M is part of the subseries “Memes to an End” and was collated and curated through random review of over 40,000 images circulating on varietal social media platforms. These visual memes are meant for slower digestion in tandem with the mix provided. For an extra thrill, burn after reading. (Destroyed Apples Magazine: Memes to an End Edition 1, 3)

Upon downloading the mix provided, readers can listen to the music and browse the images simultaneously for audio-visual entertainment. The front cover displays Earth, only it is glowing hot in reds and oranges rather than its usual verdant blues and greens. Full-bleed collages of Notre Dame, the World Trade Center, motorcycles, trees, and even water and fire hydrants immersed in ravenous, leaping flames decorate the pages. On the back cover, city streets glow orange as red and white car lights blend together in a long-exposure aerial photograph of an unidentified downtown that closely resembles Minneapolis. The implication seems to be that if the city is not yet on fire, it soon will be.23

I first come across Destroyed Apples Magazine at Communion, one of the events studied in the second movement. Stormy, the editor, is sharing them with other people at the event for sale and for free. He is also one of the DJs at Communion that Sunday. A roommate of mine ends up with a copy of Edition 0, and I find it so successful that I eventually track Stormy down for an interview and a run of the magazine.

23 These readings proved prescient, as the Twin Cities went up in flames during the summer of 2020. 138

With the intimacy of its presentation of dance music events in the Twin Cities, Destroyed Apples Magazine is an ideal transition from dance music events in writings to dance music events in the Twin Cities. This is a step from the first to the second movement of the dissertation, a turn from the general to its concrete particularities.

Zines Not Considered In 2021, Jeff Mills releases the first installment of an online zine named The Escape Velocity. This issue includes interviews with several artists including DVS1 (an interlocutor for this dissertation), an essay about darkness, and guest essays about the future of dance music events. The Escape Velocity is published by Mills’ own record label, Axis.24

24 The Escape Velovity: Issue 1, edited by Jeff Mills. Axis Records: Miami Beach. 139

1.7: Fictions Not Considered

In 2021, fictionalized representations of dance music events are recognizable symbols in texts and films. Scenes with confused cinematic time, sweaty mixing bodies, and repetitive beats from staple science fiction movies like Blade, The Matrix, and The Matrix: Reloaded are seldom narrative center-points of a story, but viewers require little clarification or elaboration when it comes to making sense of the role of these images with respect to broader arcs. In 2021, these scenes fit right in and these images are familiar. Although dance music events surface regularly in printed fiction, they do not bear nearly the significance in that format as they do in fictional film media. But one exception to this predominance of dance music events in film immerses readers in stories that revolve around dance music events. Irvine Welsh’s 1996 book Ecstasy: Three Tales of Chemical Romance presents three fictional tales of British dance music events and the people who flit across their monolithic surfaces. They take place between London and Manchester in a generic 1990s era of obfuscated authority, chemical insanity, and musical chaos. Often accidentally caught up in the momentum of an event, the characters are always pitiful in the presence of music that sweeps them off their feet and onto their dancing feet. The dance music events that typify Welsh’s stories are impassive, natural events as much as they are human phenomena.

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Movement 2: Interviews with Promoters of Six Twin Cities Dance Music Events

If you are a maker in the Twin Cities metropolitan area, when you attend a show/performance, you’re more likely to be rubbing shoulders with someone you might eventually call a peer moreso than simply someone who likes to go to shows. Try going out on a weekday, your chances of this happening increase ten-fold. One will often find artists self-producing and self-promoting in limited issues or series, running their nights. The local market for artists is often other artists, not a superfluous and anonymous public clambering for a view into the subcultural underbelly of creative innovation pouring from bedroom studios and renovated basements. – Destroyed Apples: Edition 0, 8

Minneapolis has always punched above its weight, musically. Keith Harris, 2020

2.1 Field Work

The Twin Cities – Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota – are home to a several dance music event series characterized by immersive sound, low lighting, and continuous mixed music. Some events take place weekly, some monthly, some seasonally, some annually, and some without consistent regularity. Music at these events is produced by the manipulation and mixing of tracks (played back from recordings as either vinyl records or digital files) and the live synthesis of electronic sounds. Performers use record players, CD players, digital media players, mixers, synthesizers, drum machines, microphones, digital instruments, and effects to create a set, a term that designates the duration of a performance. A set of mixed dance music in the Twin Cities might last thirty minutes or it might last six hours. And any given event is usually comprised of multiple sets; that is, multiple artists perform at most events. This movement studies six specific Twin Cities dance music event series: Warehouse 1, Freak of the Week, House Proud, Techno Tuesday, Communion, and The Headspace Collective. The field research that informs this dissertation begins when I move to Minneapolis in May, 2019 and start attending dance music events there in earnest. I had lived in the Twin Cities for stretches during several previous summers, so upon 141 beginning this research phase I had already become familiar with several Twin Cities dance music events. But in 2019 I focus on attending more events, becoming familiar with various musical genres and performance techniques, meeting people who participate in various ways, and initiating informal conversations from May until December. In January 2020 I begin contacting people and requesting permission to record interviews that would be around an hour in length. On March 13th, 2020, Minnesota’s governor Mark Walsh declares a state of emergency, and for the most part, dance music events cease. Largely cut off from meeting many new interlocutors, I decide to concentrate on interviewing one specific group of participants: event promoters. Promoters have multidisciplinary roles, especially at do-it-yourself (DIY) dance music events. They book performers, arrange security, seek out venues, negotiate sound levels, own and operate sound systems, perform music, set examples on the dance floor, design merchandise, and manage record labels. They are often those people who put out fires that spring up at events, who are responsible for event damages, be they metaphorical or literal. And this role requires a multidisciplinary flexibility; different events require different combinations of these tasks and others. Although this dissertation only interviews a single promoter in relation to each dance music event series, most of these events are produced either by promotional teams or professional staff (often a combination of the two). Each event is put on by at least one group of people acting in concert. For these reasons, the promoter’s words excerpted in this movement should therefore not be read as dominant or general representations of the events. Promoters offer personal perspectives of their events, perspectives which are often multidisciplinary and detailed out of practical necessity. So they offer perspectives on security, but these should not be read as the perspectives of security staff at dance music events. They offer perspectives on dancing, but also acknowledge that their perspectives are not always representative of all the people at their dance music events. And they offer perspectives on good sound, but these perspectives differ even just amongst promoters. That is all well and good. Promoters have multidisciplinary and detailed perspectives regarding dance music events, perspectives that are broad and 142 openended by necessity. And since not all attendees have the same broad and informed perspectives on dance music events, promoter perspectives should not necessarily be understood as objectively representative of any events in question. Got it. But this issue is folded yet again by a detail that readers encounter in the epigraph of this movement.

The local market for artists is often other artists, not a superfluous and anonymous public clambering for a view into the subcultural underbelly of creative innovation pouring from bedroom studios and renovated basements. (Destroyed Apples: Edition 0, 8)

I encounter this sentiment multiple times in casual conversations, recorded interviews, and my own impressions of events. Many dance music events in the Twin Cities, including those studied here, host artist economies. It is my impression, at the conclusion of my attending dance music events regularly in the Twin Cities, that a great number of the people who attend those events are also actively engaged with them in multiple ways. Any given dance music event in the Twin Cities is likely populated by multiple people who work on their own series of events. That being said, not everyone hosts their own events. But dancers are also musicians and they throw house parties and they do visual art and they make juice and they distribute drugs and they provide harm reduction information and they buy drinks. So promoters might, after all, be representative of many people at dance music events in the Twin Cities specifically in that many people maintain multidisciplinary means of engaging with those events. Nonetheless, none of these promoters speak with normative, moralizing, or reductive intentions; they don’t assert objective truths concerning their personal dispositions, priorities, or techniques. Engaging promoters in extended conversations does not always render a more precise idea of what’s going on at dance music events. But it does often render multiple ideas.

Research Methods My research into dance music events in the Twin Cities consists primarily of attending events and interviewing event promoters. Because the latter is easier to document (and to read), interviews provide the bulk of the material studied in the text of this movement. 143

But the selections excerpted from interviews are informed by a formidable background of notes from event participation. At events I take discrete notes on a phone, and I would subsequently transcribe those notes to a notebook. In this notebook I would flush out field notes, register questions, and make connections between events. This background of notes is born of whole-hearted participation in the events, so it is not filled with reliable headcounts or dispassionate descriptions. It contains experiential accounts, memorable conversations, descriptions of music, learning moments, artist lineups, and many tangential thoughts produced by participation in and reflection upon dance music events. The connections and lessons I acquire at dance music events are crucial to the dissertation, and this note taking practice informs the questions that I ask promoters and also contributes to the development of the dissertation’s six reading themes. I collect notes in this manner from May 2019 until June 2020. Although few of these notes are registered in the text of this dissertation, they are its becoming. During the research period, I collect notes on more event series than the six studied here. Other dance music event series that I attend and notate regularly go by names such as Wax Poets, Dark Energy, Black Mass, and System. I also attend events at venues that host one-off events, including Conga Latin Bistro, Honey, Kitty Cat Klub, System, and Pimento, some of which host some of the six events studied in this movement. And to add to the surplus of serial dance music events in the Twin Cities overflowing this dissertation, it should be noted that all these dance music events are connected to many others as well. All of the promoters interviewed work on more events than those for which they are interviewed here, and there are many events that I do not attend during this research period, but which are prominent on my radar, including events like Wizard House, Techno Girls, Deeper, House Headz, and Fractal Geometry. Events come and go, return, transform, and disappear into the production of their effects. Everything gestures towards a horizon of dance music events in the Twin Cities. The interviews excerpted in this movement take place from January to September, 2020. They are a mix of phone and in person conversations. Each person and conversation is different from the others. I contact interlocutors mostly by email and through their artist profiles on Facebook, and then often follow up with them when I see them at events. Arranging interviews requires different means of contacting people, 144 especially as events shut down due to COVID-19. Some people are more interested in the project than others; some people encourage following up, while others express mild interests but – understandably – do not want to be constantly nagged. Although I do not interview everyone with a valuable perspective, I am lucky to speak at length and on the record with six different Twin Cities dance music event promoters. Each interlocutor is interviewed in relation to one specific event for which they are the main promoter. DVS1 promotes Warehouse 1. DJ Nola promotes Freak of the Week. Jeff Swiff promotes House Proud. Brady Hill promotes Techno Tuesdays. Centrific promotes Communion. And Neil Fox promotes The Headspace Collective. They all offer insightful perspectives that are continuously punctuated by ineffable experiences dancing to loud music in the dark Interlocutors are people within two degrees of separation from me; I have mutual acquaintances with those I have not met formally prior to requesting interviews. I have spent countless hours on dance floors with multiple of these people, but I had never verbally exchanged more than pleasantries before sitting down to record conversations with any of them. Interviews take place one-on-one at cafes, homes, and on the phone. I opt to get interlocutors chatting about their events more than answering a predetermined set of questions, so I work to cultivate a comfortable atmosphere. During in person interviews, interlocutors and I would share in some consumption: sometimes coffee, sometimes food, sometimes cigarettes, sometimes beer. Phone interviews are not so conducive to communing over consumables, but we still often drink, munch, or smoke to help the conversations meander along their natural courses. The general premise of interviews invites people to contribute to a study of dance music events in the Twin Cities by discussing events they promote. (Stormy and Michaelangelo Matos are exceptions to this; I requested interviews with them on the basis of their Twin Cities dance music event writing projects.) Each interview therefore corresponds directly to one dance music event series. But as noted above, each of these people have different levels of control over their events. Some are copromoters, some direct entire teams, and some do most everything themselves. 145

I pose a core of three discussion questions to interlocutors. One question inquires about their introductions to dance music events in the Twin Cities. In my interview with Michaelangelo Matos, this question is framed in the following manner: tommy: Could tell me about when you started going to dance music events in the Twin Cities, and what those first events were?

A second question requests that promoters comment on the relationships between other dance music events in the Twin Cities and their own. An example of this question is drawn from my interview with DJ Nola about her event series Freak of the Week.

tommy: What events would you recommend to other people besides Freak of the Week? If someone was partying at Freak of the Week and they were having a good time and they were like, “What else like this exists in the Cities?”

A third question prods promoters for their outlooks on the future of dance music events in the Twin Cities. An example of this question can be drawn from my interview with Jeff Swiff about House Proud.

Tommy: Do you have any predictions for the future for the landscape of afterhours parties and dance music events in the Twin Cities? Do you think it’s gonna look like it does [now] in ten years, or radically different?

I pose these questions as opportunities arise in the flow of conversation. The other questions I ask shift over time as social conditions change rapidly at the onset of the pandemic, as I interview different people, and as I become more experienced with interviews. I ask for details about specific events and opinions on musical styles. I follow people into relevant memories as they recount histories, sometimes their own and sometimes more general. With the exception of darkness and events, I generally avoid asking direct questions about this dissertation’s six themes. I would often prod interlocutors to elaborate once they brought up darkness in pursuit of discussions about this theme. Here is an example of me doing this with Brady Hill in response to his mention of “low light” and “minimal visuals”:

tommy: Home in for a second on the dim lighting that you mentioned. Do you think that’s something you find at Intellephunk events and at larger scale, larger 146

visibility events like Techno Tuesday in Amsterdam? Or is that more of a Twin Cities thing? How do you see that kinda darkness aesthetic?

Promoter Introductions

So it’s a do-it-yourself city, which by default makes you a promoter. The only way people are going to get put on is if they do their own things. (DVS1, from interview)

This movement interviews eight interlocutors for their thoughts on dance music events in the Twin Cities. Six are interviewed as promoters, and two of them are interviewed for their perspectives as writers. Readers meet them briefly below before studying their events and interviews. Stormy is the impulse and impetus behind Destroyed Apples Magazine, but they do much more than write. I initially contacted Stormy in request of an interview about Destroyed Apples Magazine and learned during the interview that they also are involved in promoting dance music events. We speak in person at my home in Northeast Minneapolis on March 14th, 2020. In addition to their writing and promotional projects, Stormy produces music, DJs, and contributes in several additional capacities to dance music events in the Twin Cities. DVS1 is an international touring DJ who gets his musical start as a rave promoter during the late 1990s in Minneapolis. He is (among many other things) a musician, a music label founder and owner, and a sound engineer. DVS1 has outgrown his original promoter shoes, but he still throws a local event called pseudonymously in this dissertation Warehouse 1. Warehouse 1 has the highest attendance of any dance music event studied in this dissertation, but it is also the rarest, occurring only three or four times each year. DVS1 and I speak in person on September 24th, 2020 at my home in North Minneapolis. DJ Nola hosts Freak of the Week, an irregular, funk-focused event that takes place at different venues while sporting a consistent lineup of viny DJs. She is the founder and resident selector of the event, as well as a sought-after DJ who plays 147 regularly across the Twin Cities. DJ Nola and I speak in person on February 24th, 2020 at Mayslack’s Bar and Grill in Northeast Minneapolis.25 Jeff Swiff is the promoter of House Proud, a monthly Saturday night house focused dance music event that takes place at Honey in Northeast Minneapolis. Jeff Swiff also DJs at House Proud, provides support and collaboration to other promoters, and produces music. We speak in person on February 18th, 2020 at the Hard Times Café in Cedar-Riverside, Minneapolis. Brady Hill is one of the two promoters of Techno Tuesday, a monthly Tuesday night dance music event that focuses on techno music. Techno Tuesday takes place at Amsterdam Bar and Hall in Downtown St. Paul. Brady Hill is also a DJ and a member of Intellephunk, a promotional collective and sound system based in Minneapolis. We speak on the phone on March 31st, 2020. Centrific is the head of Intellephunk and the lead promoter of Communion, an outdoor daytime event occurring each Sunday during the summer. Communion takes place on the patio of the Pourhouse in Downtown Minneapolis, but it also often spills inside or into the adjacent parking garage. During the winter months, Communion is supplanted by an abbreviated and less regular Black Mass that occurs on Sunday nights. We speak twice on April 17th and April 27th, 2020, both times by phone. Neil Fox is one member of The Headspace Collective, a music collective with broad and interdisciplinary reach whose main focus is hosting dance music events. The Headspace Collective is notorious for outdoor events that stage DJs in a small geodesic dome made of PVC piping, rope, and white tarps. Neil Fox is also a DJ. We speak in person at his home in South Minneapolis on January 18th, 2020. Michaelangelo Matos is the author of a dance music event history titled The Underground is Massive, the second text reviewed in the field survey. After an initial meeting at Claddagh Coffee in West St. Paul, we speak twice on the phone on April 8th and 10th, 2020. Matos is not a promoter, but he is a long time participant in dance music events in the Twin Cities, and he has written prolifically about dance music events there and elsewhere in the US. I seek out Matos for advice on perspectives and approaches

25 Stormy also interviewed DJ Nola about Freak Of The Week for the __ Core Edition of Destroyed Apples Magazine [see page ] 148 to the project, and he graciously shares tips for contacting promoters and requesting interviews.

Descriptions of each of the six dance music event series precede the reading of each promoter interview. These descriptions are built from common knowledge and my own experiences in attendance. Otherwise, interlocutor comments on ineffability, the materiality of sound, dancing, critique, darkness, and of course events focus this movement. And yet, the six reading themes spill out of interviews with dance music event promoters, as they do out of writings about dance music events. This movement draws Twin Cities interlocutors into conversations with writings from the first movement. The third movement stages these conversations.

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2.2: Destroyed Apples

Destroyed Apples Magazine links this dissertation’s first movement to its second movement because it is linked to the promotion of dance music events. More than just a zine, Destroyed Apples is a broader entity that comprises multidisciplinary endeavors.

It’s one part label, one part magazine, it’s part of a production platform. (From interview with Stormy)

The Destroyed Apples Facebook page echoes and specifies this sentiment.

Destroyed Apples is an artist platform which provides production, promotion, and creative assistance to underground or underrepresented Live electronic artists, DJs, Visual and Performance Artists. (https://www.facebook.com/DestroyedApples/ from “About”)

Destroyed Apples is an artist platform, a site of the very artist economy that it posits in Edition 0. It fosters multidisciplinary engagement with artists who are also members of alternative communities to promote dance music and dance music events in the Twin Cities.

Interview with Stormy Stormy (also known as Ryan Dean), much like Destroyed Apples, is about much more than writing about dance music events. They themself identify with the openended multiplicity of dance music event series, the local artist economy, and the multiplicity of Destroyed Apples.

It’s hard for me to describe to people exactly what I’m doing, because it’s something that’s gonna take ten years to do. It’s only through the process of doing it that I’m going to be able to make that a reality. … I think it incorporates all of my talents into an exercise – a life exercise – of influencing people towards a cause of being more inclusive with each other, right? Of introducing conversation and subject matter that elicits an activity of reflection. (From interview with Stormy)

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Stormy and Destroyed Apples are growing together, in and through dance music events and each other. So I speak with Stormy about their writings but also about the productions, performances, and musical practices that give those writings some vibrating flesh.

Events [One-offs vs. series] Stormy reminisces about the dance music events they have promoted in the past, and muses about the possibility of more to come.

Threw a couple raves, lost my ass on one of ‘em. Majorly, like five Gs. People slept on it. People still talk about it to this day as being one of the best raves they ever went to in this city even though it was only around 150 people in attendance throughout the night. People are like, “When are you gonna throw another something like that?” Whenever I’m comfortable losing five Gs again. But I was so new. I knew what I was producing was something different, but I just didn’t have the notoriety to bring people to it. (From interview with Stormy)

Stormy acknowledges that the Twin Cities are by no means bereft of opportunities to party, to the point that even high quality dance music events might be underattended. Stormy also touches on the crucial ingredient of notoriety or reputational precedent; it can be difficult to successfully promote an event if you have never promoted an event before. Stormy discovers the expensive way that dance music events in the Twin Cities are serial in nature; they exist in their relationships to other events, and sometimes when they don’t, they struggle to subsist.

Ineffability [Preserving the magic] Stormy touches on how some participants at dance music events cultivate ineffability by intentionally preserving the mystique of music.

There are plenty of people still around who, as long as they’ve been going to events, they’ve never touched a set of decks [turntables]. They don’t know what’s going on … to them it’s just fucking magic. And to know that there are still people who are not trying to get behind the curtain, that is kinda fascinating. ‘Cause I’m the typa person who wants to see behind the curtain, I wanna know the wizard, man! But there’s plenty of people who just don’t wanna involve themselves with 151

it. They don’t know anything other than how to connect their fucking phone to the wall, you know, to just charge it. I think that’s kinda profound in its own right. (From interview with Stormy)

Sometimes people work to maintain the veil of mystery that separates them from feelings of comprehension at dance music events. Ineffability is valuable, maybe even sacred, and a functional ingredient provided at dance music events by attendees. It conditions a particular type of participation.

Dancing [Productive relation] This cultivation of ineffability allows attendees to focus on dancing. For Stormy, dancing along to music might be its own type of listening, understanding, communicating.

People are surfing when they’re dancing. Even if they’re not moving. They might just be standing on the dance floor, listening. But the whole body is an ear. (From interview with Stormy)

Stormy is talking about music made for dancing, music like the techno and house sounds found in Destroyed Apples Magazine downloads. These genres presume that consumers will be dancing more than identifying and defining sounds. They are built for interaction with a crowd of moving ears that perceive and respond to the shifting frequencies, beats, and rhythms. This music-dancer relation is not limited to itself. In certain moments, the relation produces a surplus of energy that spills out of bodies moving in music.

When somebody moves to a sound, they’re collaborating with it so they feel that impact more. It’s both drawing them in and producing something else. It’s producing more energy. And that’s the truth of most music. It produces more than what it is. (From interview with Stormy)

The relationship between dancing and music is not reducible to itself. It is a productive relationship that, on occasion, generates energy that runs through – but is itself distinct from – music and dancing. Materiality of Sound [Vibrating body molecules] 152

Bodies are ears that elaborate their relationships with music through movement. Stormy returns to this point to extrapolate how dancing is an interface between the materiality of sound and bodies.

We don’t just hear with our ears. The whole body hears. Especially the sub tones, people are going for … that bass frequency, you know? 250Hz and under is where we really start to feel it viscerally. It’s starting to vibrate the molecules in our body, the places where our ears can’t hear. And when you’re feeling something like that, you’re feeling it from like the feet up, and all around you. It consumes you. So I think this is people’s relation to bass. But it also can overwhelm the body, you know? (From interview with Stormy)

It is a fact that, eventually, low frequency soundwaves are more readily perceptible on people’s skin than by their cochlear nerves. And with sufficiently powerful sound systems, low frequencies can be amplified until they are not only perceptible on the skin. Eventually, people feel sound waves as they pass through bodies, as they sweep through stomachs and lungs and hearts and brains and intestines and knees and toes, all of which are effected and some of which become inspired. Dancing bodies swim in seas of deep vibrations, trying not to drown.

Darkness [Visuality] Stormy contributes thoughts on darkness and its appeal at dance music events in the Twin Cities.

I think people prefer it to be a little on the darker side of things visually, so they can put away their eyes and feel. (From interview with Stormy)

For Stormy, darkness is a visual aesthetic; limiting visibility encourages attendees to explore with their non-visual senses. Sensory hierarchies are reorganized, and attendees must rely on sensory and intuitive input from senses that are, under everyday conditions, supplemental to consciousness and behavior. And darkness has an additional effect. Stormy emphasizes that looking is not neutral, that gazes cast forces. Dark dance music events offer opportunities for respite from these forces that Stormy calls “visuality”. 153

I still think it comes down to visuality and the ability to release yourself from having to use your eyes. And it’s a lot easier to do that when it’s dark. … the eyes don’t just receive input. They cast a gaze, they project. I’m sure there’s some study about the effect of visuality and what it does to direct the human consciousness, because there’s people who say they can feel when someone’s looking at them, right? I think there’s a real, real, real truth to that, and it could be measured if we had instruments fine enough to do it. But thankfully the only instruments we have to see that right now is the human instrument itself. We can feel when somebody’s looking at us. That’s not just paranoia. (From interview with Stormy)

Stormy’s point is that limiting vision alters social relations, not just individual behavior. Vision is imbued with a certain cognitive activations, with specific states, and with the knowledge that visibility facilitates threatening observations. Darkness minimizes visual input, and in doing so it releases people from these states, from the fear of being seen.

To strip ourselves of that need to focus on those things, or to be self-conscious, that’s where the value is carried in darkness. (From interview with Stormy)

Darkness describes a set of conditions, an environment, in which people exist in relation to each other without being able to see each other. But it does not obtain to any objective value. For Stormy, it is the very ubiquity of the visual that assigns darkness its valuable functions.

The value of complete darkness, in the face of everything being dark, is not really valuable. But when it’s a unique experience compared to everything else that is going on, sure, then you got something different going on there. (From interview with Stormy)

For Stormy, darkness is the promise of alternatives to the visual world. This is not a permanent utopia to be realized so much as an exercise in alterity, a recurring event that offers valuable balance to the ubiquity of high definition visuality.

Critique 154

According to the thoughts Stormy offers, dark dance music events posit visuality as everyday reality, as a social norm. Daylit endeavors capitalize on the access afforded by the spread of visuality, but darkness continues to offer a sort of respite from the onslaught of data in this age of information that sentences all humanity to determinist capitalist realisms. Cameras don’t work so well in the dark, phones don’t work so well when it’s loud, and touchscreens don’t work so well beneath sweat-soaked fingers. And for Stormy, these critiques of the norms of visibility and the powers of visuality are trending at certain dance music events in the Twin Cities.

No cameras, no phones, nothing visual. That is the trend at this point. ‘Cause ever more we’re in a visual society. It’s not just being looked at anymore, it’s like we’re being documented. It’s gonna become really weird when it turns into the point where you don’t even need to have your phone out, and you’ve got a contact lens that can record everything you’re doing. ... So that relationship to darkness, I think, has a lot to do with stripping away those confines of society that normally keep us very attentive and poised. (From interview with Stormy)

Poise is not worth so much in the dark, amidst the strobes. It’s better to move so that, as the light flashes, bodies are revealed in snapshots that simultaneously challenge and seduce the understanding of any viewers.

After our interview, Stormy and I drive over to their two music studios, one private and one shared with four other musicians. Both spaces are housed by a larger building that, at one time, was owned and occupied by DVS1. The shared studio is brimming with music and sound technologies, things for making loud noises that are disruptive if not secluded to a purpose-made space. The various pieces of a drum set are scattered amongst CDs, records, headphones, keyboards, midi controllers, mixers, cables, and even an upright bass guarded by a handwritten note warning “Do Not Play”. QWERTY keyboards, zines, flyers, magazines, books, notebooks, posters, and prints join the fray. Stormy turns on their machines and communicates with me in a different way from the interview, sharing samples from recent projects. And I listen, hear, and respond in a different way, stepping back and forth and bobbing at the knees, wiggling my head around. 155

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2.3: Warehouse 1

Warehouse 1 usually occurs three times annually. It runs from late night until early morning, and at summer events the sun has often risen by the time the last dancers spill, bleary eyed, back into reality. But the winter events are uniquely characteristic of the Twin Cities. If attendees are lucky, a few snowflakes will be floating across streetlights as they make their ways to the event. Because if they’re lucky, when they emerge six hours later, the world is born anew in pristine, glittering blankets of untouched snow. If they’re lucky, they’ll walk along the Mississippi River towards a Downtown skyline reflecting the orange glow of sunrise and try to assemble anything resembling a coherent thought regarding the previous six hours. Although the dance floor is the primary focus at Warehouse 1, there is also a bar area strewn with places to lounge, bathrooms, and sometimes a juice stand. Nevertheless, techno and house sounds permeate everything; nobody inside the building can escape rumbling kicks and heaving sub bass. These are the primary sensory conditions for the duration of the event. Colorful and sometimes strobing lights are installed over the dance floor, but the rest of the space is dim, sometimes at most glowing red. There is not very much to look at, and smoke machines and dance floor smokers blow clouds that make seeing more difficult. The sparse visual input locks attendees’ visual fields into an irretrievable relationship to the thudding music until the light is fundamentally related to the sound. Lighting effects like strobes repurpose the visual sense to complement perceptions of rhythm. Sometimes this complement is darkness, sometimes pulsation, sometimes shifting color combinations that reflect shifting musical phrases. This radical restructuring of perceptive fields by immersion in specific technologies is the goal of many decisions that inform the aesthetics of Warehouse 1. People attend Warehouse 1 to be affected and to dance into amplification the musical vibrations provided by DVS1, who performs for the majority of time that the event occurs. Many people show up at the very beginning and stay until the very end, craving total immersion in the professional, ambitious sound system installed in Warehouse 1’s location. The dance floor stays packed, as does the smoking patio, but 157 in the early morning, the bar area starts to thin out and the bathroom lines become shorter. The intensity never decreases; if anything, the final hour of the event is the most special for many attendees. Around this time, people on the lookout might find someone circling the sweaty dance floor with a box of popsicles. (I think it’s the same person each time, but I’ve never been able to offer her anything but a grateful smile. I assume that’s mostly what she’s looking for.) From certain dark corners on the extremities of the dance floor, the whole crowd is sometimes visible as a crowd when the lights flash sporadically. A slow cycle of people moves in and out of, through and around the space, expressing group dynamics as larger forces guide their movements. It is difficult to satisfyingly comprehend why or how low frequency vibrations should make people’s organs churn, but understanding is not all important. The plain fact that people are well able to participate in dance music events without having any clue what is happening can quickly lead those people realizations that they have been taken account of as something bigger than themselves. They are known in the triggers of their disintegrations. I’ve danced to DVS1’s performances at multiple dance music events besides Warehouse 1, including Communion in Minneapolis, Movement in Detroit, Berghain Klubnacht in Berlin, and Even Furthur in Somewhere, Wisconsin. His performances are always disorienting for me, helping me find myself lost in unfamiliar corners of the universe and myself. But during his performances at Warehouse 1, getting lost and becoming one of the animate shadows in a dark corner feels exactly correct. At Warehouse 1, there is a feeling that people participate by disappearing into effects.

Interview with DVS1

It has to be powerful enough so that sound is the central focus. And it’s got to be dark enough so you feel free. (From interview with DVS1)

DVS1, the promoter of Warehouse 1, is an internationally known musician who tours to most continents, but he is based in Berlin, Germany if not the Twin Cities. DVS1 grew up in Minneapolis where, as a teenager, he threw raves and got his start as a DJ and 158 musician. He was also once the owner of the building that houses Stormy’s studios. In the Twin Cities, the building is still colloquially referred to as the Hush studios.

Ineffability [Hush] Hush is the name of DVS1’s first record label, which had its first release in 2011.26 DVS1 shares the story of the origination the name Hush as a flyer for a 1996 dance music event that features an anime character cut out of a magazine.

We literally cut her out and then we cut out Spiderman’s finger because we didn’t know how to use Photoshop. We put the finger in front of her lips and then we scanned that, literally. And we got a beeper number for the info line and put it on the back of the flyer. Put a date, August 23rd. And then we didn’t say anything else. We just handed that card out at raves every weekend and people were like, “Hush, shh, uh cool, ok.” And that’s how we came up with the name Hush, from that preflyer. (From interview with DVS1)

The history of Hush makes evident the appeal of ineffability in the context of dance music events. Things that resist expression correspond to people’s experiences of dance music events, and people are attracted to dance music events that push the cultivation of aesthetics of ineffability into visual domains. DVS1 reveals that, sometimes, ineffability at dance music events is tied to relatively mundane conditions.

There are subtle things. Eighty percent of the audience doesn’t really know in depth why they had a better time here versus there. For example, I used to do shows at the Record Room and I would bring in subs [subwoofers], and most of the people who would come to the Record Room didn’t know why my show “felt” better than the show the week before, or the show the week after. I created something in the environment that they physically felt [extra powerful low end vibrations], and they were like “Wow, what was that? Why was that night so amazing?” They couldn’t put their finger on it. (From interview with DVS1)

There are techniques for fostering experiences of dance music events that resist enunciation, but, according to DVS1, even promoters cannot always hope predict the

26 Hush 001: DVS1 (2011) 159 quality of any given dance music event.

… you could set up the best lights, the best sound, the best DJs and still not achieve the “magic”. There’s so many elements that have to be right to make it really good, and even if you follow those guidelines and rules you can still get it wrong. (From interview with DVS1)

For DVS1, dance music events are necessarily caught up in things outside of their own controls. Sometimes dance music events require the alignment of more factors than promoters can control. There is no equation that defines the ineffability specific to dance music events in general, and there is none that defines the ineffability specific to dance music events in the Twin Cities. But there are multiplying events that are more and less successful in materializing that ineffability.

Events [The rest of it doesn’t matter] DVS1 credits his teenage exposure to dance music events with great influence over the path his life has taken.

I had a life changing experience really early on, and then I chased that. I kept looking for that, and I kept trying to find that again and again. I always said it was like doing drugs for the first time. I got caught up right away, and then I just kept chasing the dragon. (From interview with DVS1)

And after chasing the dragon for two and a half decades, the way DVS1 approaches dance music events has changed. But he has by no means slowed his engagement with dance music events. He is now a successful touring DJ with an artist residency at Berghain, a world famous club in Berlin, Germany. He is the founder of Hush Recordings and its subsidiary label Mistress Recordings, which have six and fifteen releases respectively. And he is a sought after opinion on industry culture, having published multiple interviews reflecting on festival culture and the global dance music industry. It is understandable, then, that this professional participation in dance music events limits the energy DVS1 has left over for partying.

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I do 120-140 shows a year and I take six to eight weeks off. So if you do the math on that, when I’m not off, I’m playing. And when I’m off I disconnect from everybody and recharge myself. … Because I play so much. I do show up to a gig with enough time to catch the vibe of the party, and then I stay for just enough time to come down after my set. Then I leave. And I used to get mad at DJs I would book; I’d be like, “Wadaya mean you don’t wanna come hang out with us? Wadaya mean you don’t wanna come to dinner? Wadaya mean you don’t wanna hang out for three hours after you’re done?” But now, as a touring DJ, I absolutely get it. Because my job is to give you the best that I can in the hours that I’m playing. The rest of it doesn’t matter. I need to save and reserve my energy for getting to the next place. (From interview with DVS1)

DVS1 reveals that he usually exists in dance music events. They are where his schedule, his practice, his purpose, and his values materialize. Although he doesn’t dance much, he arranges his life to keep himself moving from event to event, from immersion to immersion, in a series of events scattered across the world.

Dancing [All I did] DVS1 used to dance more. He gets his start in the world of dance music events as a speaker freak, and that greatly shapes his passion for sounds made of beats and rhythms.

… I would go to the party from the moment it opened to the moment it closed. And I danced, that’s all I did. I didn’t take other drugs, I wasn’t really interested. That was my thing, to go dance. (From interview with DVS1)

For DVS1, dancing is the point of dance music events. Although he admits that interpretations of dance music events abound, DVS1 is clear about how he prefers attendees to participate.

I want everyone to interpret it in different ways. Some people go to dance, some people go to socialize. Some people go to do drugs; let’s be honest, it is what it is. But if you can create something free and safe and respectful, then no matter what reasons people come for, they won’t interfere in anyone else’s interpretations. That’s when I think you built the right thing. You’re just letting people have their own experiences. Whether that be on the dance floor or in the lounge or in the bathrooms or wherever it is. I would prefer that they’re all on the dance floor, but that’s my selfish want. (From interview with DVS1) 161

Dance music events are assemblages of more than can be accounted for, even by their promoters, and they inevitably draw people in and move people to more ends than only dancing. And yet dancing persists as an indisputable value for DVS1, long after his dancing days have passed.

Critique [Incorporating community critiques] DVS1 describes his methods for incorporating criticisms into serial dance music events. In the passage below, he describes the impetus for creating a set of rules for Warehouse 1. After a fellow Twin Cities dance music event promoter voices concerns about safety, DVS1 describes reaching out to them with a proposition of collaboration in the development of increased safety measures.

What pushed me over the edge to create those was that somebody decided to vocalize on Facebook some issues they had …. And they weren’t end of the world issues, but they vocalized it. … So I reached out to that person who brought up the issue here in Minneapolis … and I said, “You know I would love your opinion. Read through this, tell me if I missed something.” And then I said, “Can I count on your help? Can I count on you to be a liaison…?” … And they agreed to do it. And it was our first kickoff of having ten liaisons at [dance music events in the Twin Cities]. And maybe they weren’t super visible, maybe not even all the parties they’re visible. But they’re there and that’s something we didn’t have before. And maybe it’s a placebo effect of feeling safe. But after we initiated those rules – after we said them at the door, after they were public – other people, a bunch of women, messaged me after the party and were like, “Fucking amazing! I didn’t get bothered by anyone that night. It was great. I felt good.” My response was, “Perfect then it worked, and we’ll still fine tune it even more.” But you see that we’re trying. And we’re not just saying we’re doing it. We’re actually doing it. (From interview with DVS1)

DVS1 talks about making rules that protect people who become vulnerable at illegal events – in this instance, specifically women. This necessary issue of creating rules in free spaces is a perennial challenge for conceptualizing door policies at dance music events. Promoters must consider who is not welcome, must strategize the most effective ways to condemn and deal with threatening or generally unacceptable behavior. They must anticipate that attendees will have many definitions of that society 162 to be negated at the dance music event, which makes the formation of rules in any space that aspires to free itself of society a difficult prospect. But the imperfect realizations of these rules, their over- and undereffectiveness, are only materializations of the clearer general ethic that informs them.

I’m not infringing on someone’s free thinking. I’m gonna argue that till the day I die. (From interview with DVS1)

DVS1 insists that respect of others is foundational of dance music events in the Twin Cities and in general. But if and when respect breaks down at Warehouse 1, there are rules that establish ethical precedents for dealing with those breakdowns.

Darkness [Freedom of expression] To be sure, freedom of expression is a crucial aspect of dance music events for DVS1 that cannot be overstated, and it is closely tied to darkness.

From a psychological standpoint, regardless of the music or genre, if people feel free they let go. And to get them to feel free and let go you have to give them certain environmental things so they aren’t self-conscious. And how do you do that? Take away mirrors so they don’t look at themselves, literally or metaphorically. Take away the lighting so they’re not as intimidated by how they dance or how they freak or whatever they might do. Even people getting naked at parties. In the last year, I’ve seen people getting comfortable, and I’ve seen one or two or three people at [Warehouse 1] doing that. And I’m like great! If I can create that atmosphere and fine tune that for people to feel safe enough to do that, amazing. I would not be able to do that. I’m envious of the people who feel free enough to do that. I wish I could but I can’t. Even in my freest moment I couldn’t do it. (From interview with DVS1)

Also with respect to the performance stage where he spends the majority of his time at dance music events, DVS1 prefers darkness for the freedoms it allows.

I don’t want lights on me. I want to be comfortable so I feel free. Everyone’s already by default looking at the DJ. Whether I agree with it or not, they’re looking at the DJ. And we’re all human, we’re all self-conscious. I know everyone’s looking at me, and I don’t necessarily want to be looked at for the next twelve hours. So I want the lights off. (From interview with DVS1) 163

Musicians at dance music events are not necessarily to be viewed. They are present so that they can provide a continuous mix of music and sounds. DVS1’s ability to offer that mix is tied to his own feelings of comfort and freedom of expression, which are predicated – in part – on whether people are focusing on what he looks like, compared to how his music sounds.

Materiality of Sound [Twin Cities tradition] DVS1 describes how powerful sound systems complement the freedoms afforded by darkness at dance music events. The materiality of sound and darkness join together to recontextualize people by assembling an unaccustomed, reorienting sensory surround that distinguishes itself from everyday reality.

I think there’s a discomfort in losing your senses for a moment, and there’s a discomfort in giving in to your atmosphere and your surroundings. But in everyday life we’re surrounded by distractions, pretty lights, colors, phones, this, that. And when you suddenly step into immersive sound, it’s so powerful that you have no choice but to give in. The lights are dark enough so that you can be weird. And you’re that much closer to the formula of letting go. (From interview with DVS1)

Dance music events in the Twin Cities, especially, prioritize the amplification of sound and have high expectations of the force and quality of a their sound systems. Dancers at lots of different events are often fully submerged in low frequency, high quality sounds. According to DVS1, other cities do not necessarily have the same priorities.

You would think that every city was like ours. And then I went to other cities and I realized, “Nope they’re not like ours. They’re not as into sound or they don’t realize that sound should be the focus.” (From interview with DVS1)

The Twin Cities precedent of assembling immersive sound systems for dance music events is not something written into stone; the centering of sound is more of a reputation than objective fact. But DVS1 describes how it is something that vibrates in people as a result of exposure to the forceful material of powerful sound systems at dance music events. 164

Why do we have such a culture of having big sound systems here? It’s been handed down. We all learn from our experiences. We go, we see something, and we take that and we think, “Hm, I like this and that and that aspect of it; let me turn that around.” And then because we’re in this city of DIY you get all these kids who have to do their version of it [centered sound], and they do it their own ways. And so I learned from somebody, some other kid learned from me, and then down the line. Whether or not we even know why we do it at first, we end up following the precedent. It’s embedded in us. (From interview with DVS1)

People attend dance music events, have transformative experiences, and go on to reproduce the conditions of those experiences without a total understanding of those conditions. In the Twin Cities, powerful sound systems are some of those propagated material conditions. The materiality of sound iterates itself through promoters, dancers, musicians, event staff, and the experiential expectations and conversations that circulate between them. The materiality of sound even iterates itself through DVS1’s mother.

My mom had a rave experience at Future Classic. She told me, “Oh my god we had an amazing time. We left and the sun was up.” And my mom was telling me about her rave moment. And she had “the” rave moment. Blew my mind. And I was like, holy shit, she just had that moment.

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2.4 Freak Of The Week

Freak Of The Week takes place sporadically, but more often than Warehouse 1. It bounces around bars in Minneapolis – primarily Pimento and Kitty Cat Klub – depending on the availability of those bars and DJ Nola’s own schedule.27 In her own words, DJ Nola describes Freak Of The Week as a dance party. DJ Nola and her crew play funky cuts that I don’t readily recognize but with rare exception. But the genres are recognizable to the point that attentive listeners can quickly learn and sing along to catchy disco hooks.

We do play house music too, and we kinda like go off of those things. It’s not like strictly funk and disco but that’s kinda the basis of it. Yeah, it’s basically a dance party for funkier styles of music. (From interview with DJ Nola)

Freak Of The Week is a bar night with a modest cover, usually between five and ten dollars. As many people congregate at the bar and chat over drinks as tap their feet anxiously while waiting to spirit their own drinks away to the dance floor. When Pimento, a bar and restaurant in Whittier Minneapolis, hosts the event, attendees order Jamaican cuisine from their full menu. Not everyone at Pimento during Freak Of The Week is in attendance strictly for the dance music event. The bar itself has plenty of regulars, so even if event-specific attendance is sparse, there are plenty of people bobbing their heads to the funky grooves as they do their own bar things. But the small dance floor adjacent to the bar is usually well populated during Freak Of The Week. People smile and bob from foot to foot and greet each other, meet each other, toast each other with Red Stripe beers, exchange phone numbers. The bar is not dark; everyone can see everyone, even if incandescent bulbs have been replaced with dimmed, colored LEDs. The people dance anyway, having fun with it, allowing the community to perform itself. Dancing rarely happens paired up; the dance floor is a moving, swirling mix of people exploring, doing their things. The DJ booth is on the opposite side of the dance floor from the bar. Behind the DJs, a hallway leads outside to an enclosed rear patio with plenty of room for multiple

27 Readers already encountered Freak Of The Week and DJ Nola in the first movement’s reading of Destroyed Apples Magazine (Section 1.Section 1.6). 166 groups to gather. The effect is such that the dance floor is in the middle of the natural pedestrian traffic that flows through Pimento. While at the bar, attendees can view the dance floor from the rear. And upon reentering from the patio, attendees view the dance floor from the perspective of the DJs, from the front. Outside, a three season stage offers partial shelter from frozen and liquid precipitation, and people often huddle there for a breath of fresh air during the colder months. In the summer, strangers chat more easily over cigarettes, but they’re there all year round.

Interview with DJ Nola DJ Nola has multiple regular DJing obligations around the Twin Cities, and she throws one-off events like Disco Mama (a Mother’s Day special) and a holiday party at the Underground Music Café. But Freak Of The Week is more than the set she wants to play or a holiday she wants to celebrate. It is the dance music event she wants to throw.

Events [Creative expression] DJ Nola promotes Freak Of The Week to share music with other people, but also so that she can pursue a particular desire of hers: a specific version of a dance music event.

The reason I enjoy these smaller parties is because I pretty much run the whole thing. I’ve just decided to run the show myself. (From interview with DJ Nola)

Nola promotes Freak of the Week to have access to her ideal dance music event, to be able to control as many factors as possible that participate in her desired product. Opinions abound concerning the factors that make a dance music event special, so it’s no surprise that DJ Nola has her own. Freak Of The Week is an opportunity for DJ Nola to materialize her party preferences, and this is in part because it is connected to the type of dance music events that impressed themselves upon her years ago.

I fell in love with raving when I was like 19. Disco-house was my thing. I still love that, the old disco house that’s super repetitive and obnoxious. I love that stuff, 167

that’s my favorite! I will just jump up and down when I hear that music. (From interview with DJ Nola)

The imagination of dance music events that DJ Nola materializes with Freak Of The Week is one that crept into her heart when she attended dance music events as a teenager. The impressions of those events live in her and express themselves in her creative pursuits.

Dancing [Lead by example] DJ Nola wants people to dance at her events, and she tends to lead by example.

I probably don’t dance as much as I want to, but I definitely get an hour or two on the dance floor every time we throw a party. I try to just be on the dance floor if possible, ‘cause then I can show people that’s what you’re supposed to do. Sometimes it’ll be started at 9[pm], nobody’s on the dance floor, people are all at the bar. And I’m just dancing, and that’ll bring more people out on the dance floor. That’s the reason I do all this. (From interview with DJ Nola)

Freak Of The Week is open to many different comers, but its host has a very specific, groovy style of participation in mind for everyone. DJ Nola’s goal is to get everyone jumping around, dancing to deep cuts of looping disco stabs. And in her opinion, this goal has everyone’s best interests in mind.

It’s healthy to go dancing. It’s like working out. It’s good for you, it’s meditative. It’s something that a lot of us are really drawn to. (From interview with DJ Nola)

For DJ Nola, the health benefits of dancing far outweigh the stresses of organization, the nerves that accompany performance, or the effects of inebriants. Dancing is the correct way to participate at Freak Of The Week because it is good and good for people.

Critique [Local sound systems] Part of DJ Nola’s imagination of her desired event involves the venue’s sound system. In her opinion, many of the sound systems at dance music events in the Twin Cities aren’t quite right, and this deserves critique. 168

I have an issue with sound systems here: they’re either too loud or they sound terrible. And I’ve been to places not in this city where I feel like they’ve done the sound right, so I wanna get to that point where I set a sound system up so it sounds the way I want it to. That is loud, but not overly loud to the point where it would damage people’s ears. I really hate wearing earplugs, so going to warehouse parties is kinda hard for me. I used to do it all the time when I didn’t care about my hearing and I could handle it, but I have a hard time with it now. (From interview with DJ Nola)

DJ Nola argues that different people prefer different sound systems. Different ideas about good sound distinguish dance music events from each other, but the omnipresent question about quality sound collects them in conversations. This critique may seem at first to be a far cry from a critique of capital or dominant ideology, but readers should remember DVS1’s sentiments regarding the precedent of centered sound that predominates in the Twin Cities. DJ Nola, by critiquing this precedent, is inviting alternatives to what many dance music event attendees in the Twin Cities consider economically viable in a DIY circuit: an overarching dedication to centering sound above all other aspects of dance music events. By voicing frustration with overly loud warehouse parties, Nola provides emic critique of the dominant paradigms of dance music events in the Twin Cities. This demonstrates that local dance music events are dependent on formats that are economically viable in that they are recognizable, in that they exist in relationships with other dance music events.

Darkness [Embracing dark energy] At Freak Of The Week, people generally hear funk, disco, proto house and progressive beats. DJ Nola juxtaposes this “happier” music to darker music that predominates at many dance music events in the Twin Cities.

I always think I’m drawn to the soulful stuff that makes me wanna jump around. That stuff is happier to me. (From interview with DJ Nola)

And although dark music is not her preference, DJ Nola has an appreciation for its premises.

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I get it. Being on the dance floor is a release of a lot of different things, and I have been to [Warehouse 1] and felt the dark energy. I don’t know if it’s leaving me or if it’s just there and you can embrace it? Yeah, you can just maybe embrace the dark a little bit because there’s a lot of dark shit happening in the world. And to embrace that is interesting. Whereas my ear enjoys different, funkier sounds, I guess. But I still love the dark shit too. I think it’s people embracing different emotions. (From interview with DJ Nola)

For DJ Nola, it is possible for the darkness to be too dark and for the speakers to be too loud. And yet, she still throws a successful serial dance music event, continues to experiment with one-offs, and is invited to play at events all over the Twin Cities. She insists that there are a variety of popular aesthetics that inform and inspire dance music events in the Cities.

Ineffability [Multiple partying] This fits well within DJ Nola’s understanding of the multiplicity of partying.

But I think partying can be different for certain people. Partying can be dancing super hard, not even drinking. Or it can be getting wasted. (From interview with DJ Nola)

DJ Nola indicates here that partying is multiple already at one single dance music event; that is, different people will probably be partying in different ways even at any given installment of Freak Of The Week. In the Twin Cities, varieties of dance music events differentiate themselves from each other based on the material that originally inspires them. But perhaps what gathers all of these dance music events under a common umbrella is that each one – within itself – already constitutes a multiplicity of parties for its variegated crowds.

Materiality of Sound [Feel it] But amidst all this multiplicity, and whether it is with funky or dark tunes, for DJ Nola dance music events provide access to different places. This access is related to the feelings that sound systems generate by amplifying music, altering people’s sensory infrastructures, ushering in the potential to release a grip on reality. 170

It’s an escape from reality, obviously. And when there are speakers that are loud enough that you can feel the music, it makes a big difference. You can really get in there, and it’s nice to not even have to think about all that’s happening. You’re just there, and you’re experiencing this music that brings you to a certain place. And you don’t have to think about it. You can just feel it. I think a lot of it is about a release. (From interview with DJ Nola)

There are different ways to party; there are many ways for people to get out of their routines and infuse them with musical energy. But in most instances, according to DJ Nola, you’re gonna need a sound system.

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2.5 House Proud

House Proud is a monthly dance music event that books DJs to play varieties and subgenres of house music. Jeff Swiff, one of the main promoters, describes what the event is looking for in its artists.

You’ll see us book somebody that plays disco house, and then somebody that plays tech house, somebody that plays Berlin underground house, shuffle house, wonky house, bangers …. (From interview with Jeff Swiff)

House Proud takes place at Honey, a live music and dancing venue in Northeast. Located in the basement level of a bar on a commercial block, Honey seems at liberty to be as loud as they want until all bars close at 2am. The result is a club atmosphere on the weekends where the artsy working class of Northeast mix with a Dinkytown college crowd. Honey hosts a variety of entertainment, but this dissertation focuses on House Proud. House Proud puts on local DJs alongside touring names, but the DJs are not the focus for a great deal of the sweaty dance floor. They are often buried in one corner or another to make room for the groove and the constant circulation of attendees to the dance floor, to another corner of the dance floor, to the bathroom, to the bar, back to the dance floor, to the sidewalk for some fresh air. Most of the dimly lit underground space is either bar, dance floor, or a fluctuating space that is something between the two. In other words, on House Proud nights Honey is a club. Attendees hand their IDs to a bouncer at street level before walking down wide stairs to the below-ground venue. Many people dance in groups with their friends, clutching drinks and laughing directly at and with each other. Some people bop alone with their eyes closed, and a few stand stationary and attempt verbal conversations. Similarly few people on the dance floor are preoccupied with their phones. At House Proud, people know what to expect; they show up for continuous mixed music in a dark space. But people do trickle onto and off the dance floor, sometimes stepping outside onto Hennepin Ave where the Mississippi River whispers two blocks to the west. They 172 leave drinks inside before climbing back up the stairs to step outside where metal tables and chairs are chained together and to a lamp post. Honey is not licensed to have outdoor drinking at night, but some event-goers surreptitiously tuck cans and bottles inside jackets and sip them discreetly in the cool night air. Occasionally pot smoke drifts through the chattering groups, but for the most part people are cautious with their rule- breaking. Some of them judge each other; this event attracts a mix of cool, experienced people and early stages clubbers. While not everyone chats, everyone hears the same music. In the winter, cold winds whip up the street from the river and smokers shelter in the shallow alcoves offered by front doors of businesses closed for the night, recessed conveniently from the building facades. In the summer, evening air is refreshing on skin that was hard at work in a basement where the beat still thuds. Music is audible outside, but always more so and less so as the door opens and closes, as people enter and exit.

Interview with Jeff Swiff Jeff Swiff is a promoter of House Proud, a DJ, and a cofounder of Nicewon Recordings, a record label. He performs at events hosted by local collectives like The Headspace Collective and Intellephunk, he publishes mixes, and he supports dance music events in the Twin Cities with House Proud’s resources. At House Proud, there are often flyers scattered on Honey’s small tabletops, promoting events to come. Honey is a meeting point, a nexus for people to cross paths with latent interests.

We’ll have people ask us if they can promote their parties and shows and what have you, and the answer is always “Absolutely.” I will sometimes hit up other people and be like, “Give me your flyer media. Let’s grow the community.” It’s like, you can’t just live here. There is a sense of community and you have to try to create awareness for new things. Even if you don’t necessarily agree with them, the ideas and the principles of what other dance music events are trying to do is still aligned with what you’re trying to do. Just because your tastes are a little different doesn’t mean the effort is different. (From interview with Jeff Swiff)

Jeff Swiff acknowledges that House Proud participates in a community of dance music events, and he is clear on his commitment to contributing to the well-being of that 173 community. In his mind, this community should have lots of different events that are all supportive of each other not in spite of, but because of their differences.

Events [Single genre] These differences are already abundant. Jeff Swiff describes how events in the Twin Cities are organized largely by genre.

Niche parties that are focused on “a” genre or “a” subgenre are kinda now driving the little individual scenes within a bigger scene. Less often do we find ourselves getting together for drum and bass, maybe trance, house, tech-house, and breaks or leftfield techno at the same event. You never really see all of those things coming together. (From interview with Jeff Swiff)

All of these different events might constitute a scene, but what is indisputable is that these distinct events are interacting outside of the boundaries of their respective genre specifications. Multigenre dance music events are rare, even though multiplying genres define various dance music event series in the Twin Cities.

Materiality of Sound [Centered music] Jeff Swiff uses the term “main centered music” to describe events that are music- focused more than they are social, economic, or cultural.

I feel like main centered music is thriving right now with parties, and I feel like there’s plenty of after-hours oriented to that. But I also feel there’s a little bit of a recklessness from people that may attend those things only in that attendees don’t always respect what it is. Because it’s fleeting for them. They don’t care if it’s there any other night. So I’m not necessarily sold on the fact that some of these other parties that exist now will be here ten years from now, ya know? Because it takes a certain type of person to want to maintain a culture, push it forward, respect the sounds, pay attention to people that are honing their craft and try to deliver on experiences that they learned from people before them. (From interview with Jeff Swiff)

Main centered music foregoes the trappings generally required for a sustainable community, and it prioritizes dance music events with excellent sound in the present. Main centered music demands respect, for it might be both the success and the 174 downfall of a dance music event series. Not all those who attend any given event will be there with the correct intentions, or with any intentions, and this does not always cultivate sustainability for grassroots music communities. If people are showing up only for the music or the sound, and not at all for the community, the former is sure to eventually deteriorate.

Ineffability [Wadaya mean?] As a promoter with community-oriented priorities at the nexus of many dance music events in the Twin Cities, at the intersecting of several domains, as a person respected for having his finger on the pulse, even Jeff Swiff can’t keep up with everything that’s happening in the area. Even Jeff Swiff is at something of a loss for words as to what all, exactly, constitutes dance music events in the Twin Cities.

There’s so many little pockets of everything happening. It’s expanded so much. It’s important for me to keep track of who’s doing what, to make sure that I pay attention to people who are trying to say something. I produce music and put on parties, so I wanna pay attention to that. I do homework to try to stay current, but I’ve fallen way off. I’m like “Oh my god wadaya mean there’s an afterhours party on that side of the city?” And “Oh my god wadaya mean there’s like an afterhours party that had EDM last night and there were a thousand people there? Like what do you mean? What do you mean?!?!” It’s constantly evolving; it’s kinda hard to keep up on. (From interview with Jeff Swiff)

This interview is another instance in which I come to feel more comfortable with how lost I am in all of this music, in all of these multiplying events. It is gratifying to learn that even folks in the know don’t have a hold on everything, and that incomplete knowledge does not stop them from pursuing the materializations of their inspirations.

Dancing [The priority] Ultimately, all that community and all that homework are means to an end. For Jeff Swiff, keeping up is crucial but it’s not the necessarily the point, so much as dancing.

As I get older I put more emphasis on making sure that I’m going to something where I think I’m going to dance. That’s my priority. I’m not really wondering, “Who am I gonna see there?” I don’t really care. It’s nice to see people, it’s nice 175

to share hugs. But that’s not the defining factor of what I’m gonna go to. I like to go to Communions where there are DJs that I know are gonna rock my face. Then I’ll make sure to attend. (From interview with Jeff Swiff)

Jeff Swiff doesn’t disguise the fact that he likes to dance at certain events more than others. Not all events are equally desirable, for different events offer different sets of social and aesthetic priorities. For Jeff Swiff, the priority is clear.

I wanna go and get lost for a couple hours and then be able to tear up. (From interview with Jeff Swiff)

Keeping up with homework, socializing, learning about new music, all these tasks complement dancing at dance music events. Jeff Swiff works to sustain dance music events in the Twin Cities in part to sustain his access to opportunities for getting lost to face-rocking beats. By committing his creative and energetic resources to the community that participates in those events, Jeff Swiff is chasing a passion.

Critique [Underground] For Jeff Swiff, the term “underground” designates a mentality dedicated to the continuation of popular access to getting lost in musical dancing experiences.

I think that people that are underground-focused tend to value those moments and protect them: right people, excluding people that are bigoted or homophobic or, “Oh my god that’s weird,” or don’t dance or that crowd up on the dance floor and don’t respect dance space for other people. I think that the underground is the antithesis of a lot of manufactured superstar DJ moments filled with rooms of drops, confetti guns, and sparklers. There is a time and place for all that shit; I get that it’s society and people like what they like. But at the same time you’ll find that the majority of time people are trying to get away from that. (From interview with Jeff Swiff)

According to Jeff Swiff, an underground mentality eschews the sparkle that mainstream society assigns to significant events. The underground specifies its populations by excluding specific groups of people. But the underground is not specific to the dance music events in the Twin Cities; it is a more general disposition found in areas with active artist economies across the country. 176

Even parties in Los Angeles. Some of those crews out there, they’re doing the same thing. You start to notice that when you link up with communities around the US they’re all kinda doing the exact same thing. Which is protecting each other, the music, and the longevity of whatever it is they wanna do. And they’re all providing similar spaces through evasive techniques, to people that don’t deserve to just happen upon something. (From interview with Jeff Swiff)

Underground describes communities – musical and otherwise – that attempt to separate themselves from society and to offer that separation to other people. According to Jeff Swiff, an underground scene connects to other undergrounds by putting forth proactive, social, aesthetic protests to the music and events provided by reality, society, or the mainstream. And as these latter concepts bear multiple, complicated meanings for Jeff Swiff, so do undergrounds.

Darkness [Commercial liability] House Proud is a club night at a commercial venue that abides by the specifications stipulated in its licensing contracts. House Proud might have certain predilections for the underground, but it is not a rave. It is far from one-off parties in a squatted places. Because of this, the safety concerns of the venue sometimes take precedence over Jeff Swiff’s aesthetic preferences. One such instance of disagreement between the venue’s safety concerns and Jeff Swiff’s aesthetic priorities regards darkness on the dance floor.

Something I wish I could improve would be the feel of the room in conjunction with keeping Honey happy with adequate lighting. (From interview with Jeff Swiff)

Honey’s owners and security want to be able to see the House Proud dance floor to protect people from being taken advantage of and to prevent people from consuming illegal drugs on their property. Dance music events can resist supervision, as many high school chaperones can attest. And in an environment where alcohol consumption is a common form of human relation, social interactions can and do get out of hand. It is easy to understand Honey’s lighting demands of the events they host. Unfortunately, understanding won’t dim the lights.

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It’s glaring, it’s bright. Because that floor gets packed, so there are safety concerns. Honey’s staff wanna be able to see and get to things that are issues. But I struggle with that brightness. It’s red light, it’s on and it’s bright all the time. It’s not easy to do cool stuff. (From interview with Jeff Swiff)

Control over lighting marks differences among dance music events in the Twin Cities. Events that take place in commercial venues have to cooperate with a venue’s liability, while unlicensed events can provide more immersive – albeit riskier and uninsured – environments. Unlicensed events that take place in their own venues can keep the dance floor dark, but they also install ambitious lighting technologies and offer lighting artists opportunities to playfully conjoin sound and light in synesthetic performances.

Some other parties are still able to do this because they have their own space, clearly. The intricacies of lighting matching music is awesome. (From interview with Jeff Swiff)

Unlicensed events can administer whatever lighting they desire, so they can experiment with stunning audiovisual synchronizations and total darkness. It is worth noting that different people are drawn to these different conditions, to these different balances of safety and uncompromising aesthetic vision. But ultimately, for Jeff Swiff, all dance music events tread on risky terrain.

We can’t control all of the attendees that come. So we’re very adamant about taking people’s requests and complaints seriously. Safety is super important. We react as fast as we can. If somebody needs to get ejected, we do it quick. “What’s happening? Can you back that up? What’s this person doing?” If they don’t need to be ejected right away then Honey’s security will watch them and so on and so forth. We try our best to make it saf-er, a more reasonable dance floor where people don’t have to worry about stuff. But we can’t make any promises. So we try to maintain consistency in that regard of doing right by people that come. We are trying to create a space where people can lose themselves, or find themselves. (From interview with Jeff Swiff)

Once again, darkness ties back to dangers that appear as necessary risks of dance music events, as well as the promises that make them desirable. For Jeff Swiff, darkness is connected to the threat of an uncontrollable crowd, to the dangerous 178 interactions that are the potential of every community. But it is also connected to the reorientation of the people in that crowd, and the mechanism is simple. Lights keep people rooted in the structures of social reality; darkness is where they can lose themselves.

The last House proud before COVID-19 shuts down dance music events is March 6th, and Elaine Eos of The Headspace Collective is DJing. The bar is packed and the dance floor is packed but there is room to prance around a bit in the back on a low stage next to where a visual artist is programming lights. Two other goofballs, a couple, are nearby. One of them is sneezing repeatedly and prolifically and wondering aloud whether it’s the ketamine or the coronavirus. Honey is now closed, and House Proud will never happen there again. But House Proud is ongoing even though there has not been an event for more than a year at the time of this dissertation’s writing. As a serial event, it is always ongoing. It is never completely over each time it finishes at 2am, so much as it takes a break for a month. Its past and future are differential repetitions. There are different performers, different types of music, different participant mindsets upon approach, participation, and retreat. But throughout all of this difference, there is the impression of a deep thud thud, thud thud, thud thud, thud thudding beat that continues to beat, even in the absence of the event.

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2.6 Techno Tuesday

Beginning early in 2019, Techno Tuesday takes place at the Amsterdam Bar and Grill on the second Tuesday of every month, usually from 8pm-11pm. Sometimes it features one artist, and sometimes up to three. Attendance is modest, in my experience not breaking one hundred people. But despite the pounding music it is a loungier event. Techno Tuesday is accessible, cheap (often just $5), and low-pressure. All of this might seem to sit in contrast to the pounding bass drums, charging rhythms and dissonant pads that fill the air of the Amsterdam during the event. But most people are out on these Tuesday nights to get hammered by kick drums. Before passing into immersive sound through a tall black curtain that frames the back of the dance floor, attendees pay admission in the pub area of the venue. A full service bar and kitchen offers an array of beers, cocktails, and fried Dutch bar snacks. The dance floor has a high ceiling and plenty of space to swing and bounce around to the professional sound of a commercial live music venue. Attendance never packs the dance floor or causes a long lines at the bar, and few people are shooting for intoxication early on a Tuesday evening. You can put your loaded fries on a high top and boogie in a ten foot radius around it to invite other dancers to come share in a salty mess. Outside, a cute fenced-in smoking patio seats people in the middle of downtown St. Paul. The exchanges on this patio are amiable, leisurely, and unpretentious. People ask each other how they found Techno Tuesday, what other events they attend, what kind of musical or creative interests they have, and who they might know in common. I start attending this event during wintertime, and people shiver together in the sweat they work up inside. Attendees don varying degrees of layers in varying degrees of anticipation of the sometimes subzero temperatures that befall the Twin Cities late at night. Techno Tuesday is the sole dance music event series studied in this dissertation that takes place in St. Paul. All other events take place across the river or up the riverbank in Minneapolis. Techno Tuesday makes this project a study of the Twin Cities, rather than just Minneapolis. And given the degree to which these two cities are 180 intertwined, noting the involvement of St. Paul in the significant relations of other events studied here is crucial. The banks of and bridges over the Mississippi, on both the east and west sides, have long been active locations for all sorts of dance music events from relaxed campfires to full-scale raves. Any study of dance music events that take place in Minneapolis is incomplete without an appreciation of the significance of St. Paul- Minneapolis relations.

Interview with Brady Hill Brady Hill is one person from a five person team who promote and run Techno Tuesday. He and his partner join another couple to handle organization, booking, and sound, while a fifth contributor focuses on providing projected visuals.

Darkness [Techno lighting] When asked about the influences of vision for the event, Hill quickly brought up the lighting.

One thing that I see at a lot of techno-oriented events is low light. (From interview with Brady Hill)

Hill understands this darkness as something that typifies many different techno events, even though it has many different versions or “interpretations”.

And it [darkness] does have a vibe, like, a feeling. But I think – and this is just my opinion – that it’s more of a vast [widespread] thing than just the Midwest or Minneapolis. The darkness that is. I mean, we’re all doing our own interpretation of it as anybody would. But it does seem overarching with techno in my opinion. (From interview with Brady Hill)

Although low lighting is low lighting at techno events all across the world, low lighting is different at every event. Likewise, darkness does not always predominate so much as offer an appropriate balance to the light.

There is a very interesting balance between light and dark if we’re talking about music styles, that I see existing within the Minneapolis techno scene. (Interview with Brady Hill) 181

Different types of darknesses connect techno events to each other, subsequently connecting St. Paul to Minneapolis across the river and Amsterdam across the ocean.

Events [Passing energies] Hill ascribes his local dance music event influences to Intellephunk, a dance music collective with which he is affiliated.

Things I’ve seen from their [Intellephunk’s] parties and then things I’ve learned working their parties, Techno Tuesday is a culmination of all those things, I guess. It’s energies. (Interview with Brady Hill)

At dance music events, Intellephunk passes influence to Hill in the form of energies. Hill is himself a member of Intellephunk, a group that has been putting on dance music events, renting out sound, and offering support to budding local events for more than twenty years. Hill speaks to the synergy that exists among the members of the group, especially when they are collectively focused at a dance music event.

We’ve been going to parties for years. We get to go to events all the time, and we hear all these different DJs. We’re always having “the” experience. So when we put on an event together, the idea is to share that experience with other people, right? That means it’s important that we’re immersed in the event, so that the experience blends, so there’s no separation between the crew and the attendees. It’s also important to stay conscientious about what we’re contributing to the event. I don’t know if that came out right, does that make any sense? (Interview with Brady Hill)

When Intellephunk throws an event, the crew blends with the community. People who have already had “the” experience, or who live it every day, mix with people who have not had “the” experience yet with the intention of facilitating a community of experiences. These Bodhisatvas of the dance floor are committed to the spreading of dance music events as much as to the cultivation of their own internal experiences.

Dancing [Natural states] Typical of “the” experience is the phenomenon of DJ-dancer feedback cycles. Dancing 182 and performing music partake in each other, proving to each other their mutual reliances on constitutive relations, on forces not of their own domains.

One thing I’ve always liked about DJing and playing music is the energetic connection that can achieve when an artist is flowing in their natural state and the dance floor is flowing in their natural state. (Interview with Brady Hill)

Dancing and DJing are natural phenomena. These two complementary activities are part of the laws of the cosmos, and they find these natural laws in each other.

Materiality of Sound [Audio engineers] Hill shared thoughts on the sound engineering involved in hosting an event with loud music at someone else’s venue, with someone else’s sound system. Using technologies of this power usually require a professional, but it is also a deeply taste-based expertise. Finding a person with the ability to set a venue’s sound system to amplify a promoter’s preferences can be a difficult task (maybe like finding a therapist), but Hill has been lucky with the Amsterdam staff.

The sound is done by one of the venue’s engineers. There’s like three of ‘em, so in that way it’s kind of a crapshoot. But typically we get a guy who didn’t necessarily have much experience, I don’t think, with the techno, and our techno scene. I know he worked electronic artists before. But he was really open minded with what I was describing to him and how I wanted things to sound. So basically, just pretty open to getting it the way we wanted it to be. So we’ve been really fortunate in that regard. I have access to an audio engineer that I can hire, if I needed to. But working with Amsterdam and Techno Tuesday we haven’t had to. (Interview with Brady Hill)

Hill emphasizes the value of a cooperative, openended relationship between sound engineer and promotional team to tune the materiality of sound to an effective immersive quality.

Critique [Shows] Although he does not limit himself to techno events in the Twin Cities, Hill does distinguish his preferences for techno, house, underground events and “afters shit” from 183

“shows” and “bass music” events.

But I haven’t been going to too many bass music shows lately just because I personally don’t enjoy the energy. It’s not that it’s bad or anything, just different than what I’m used to. The best way I could describe it is very much “on”. It’s very flashy, there are a lot of not-dressed girls. There’s a bunch of fucked up guys being dicks. Whatever dude, it’s a bunch of weird dynamics that I don’t specifically see at like some of the afters shit that we go to, techno, house, underground. (Interview with Brady Hill)

Hill prefers a specific atmosphere that intentionally distances itself from spectacular displays of misogyny and intoxication. Without directly affirming the contents of his preferences, he levels critique at other dance music events on the basis that they do not confront certain societal norms to his satisfaction.

Ineffability [Conversational definitions] Although his event is named Techno Tuesday after the music genre known as techno, Hill hesitates to define that genre.

There’s certain kicks you would classify that would hit better in techno. I am a percussionist and I can identify percussive elements that I would prefer in techno. And I’m sure that there’s something out there that would define it. But I know that anytime I was being elitist about what is and isn’t techno, I was probably just being closed minded, right? Because I play techno and I like techno music, I think I have the balls to put the name Techno Tuesday on it because I was just gonna stand behind whatever my interpretation of it was. And if anybody had a problem with it you know, we can talk about it. “Let’s hear why you don’t think this is techno or why I think it is, and like maybe we can learn something about it.” But I kinda just put Techno Tuesday out there, it’s my interpretation of techno. (Interview with Brady Hill)

Hill aligns definitions of techno that are too narrow with elitist attitudes, and prefers to leave the definition, literally, conversational. Although not everything is techno, the conditions that make this statement true are not quite sayable because techno is mixed music; tracks are almost always performed blended with other tracks, instruments, samples, and noises.

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2.7 Communion

Communion is a daytime dance music event that occurs each summer from May to September. It is an Intellephunk event, but it is primarily the work of Centrific, one of Intellephunk’s ringleaders. Its venue, the Pourhouse, is a sports bar in downtown with a rear patio surrounded on all sides by high-rising walls of neighboring buildings and a parking garage. This creates a peculiar spatial effect of being in a narrow, crowded area that, high above, opens onto the sky. And although people can’t see far in any direction but skywards from the dance floor, the Communion sound system is audible for blocks in every direction. Every Sunday every summer, Communion is something of a heartbeat for the Twin Cities. The tracks that attendees hear at Communion are heard in relation to the whole set, to the other sets at any given Communion event (and maybe to all the sets that have ever occurred in the long history of Communion), to the Twin Cities, and to the local sound system that amplifies it. These are just a few of the series in which the roiling sense of any given track is heard to be implicated. When it rains, an arrangement of tarps, always rigged a bit differently, protects different amounts of the patio. And when it rains, there is always the chance that the dance floor might move inside, or at least into the parking garage. A little bit of summer precipitation often makes for perfect dancing weather. The event often begins in the late afternoon, so if the sun is shining attendees might dip leisurely in the one of the Cities’ nearby lakes before biking downtown to the Pourhouse, the bar that hosts Communion. And at the close of an evening of sweaty dancing, sometimes the lakes beckon again. Hair is pinned up and strewn about the head amongst jagged undercuts, framing sunglasses of as many shapes and sizes as there are people. There are loose and baggy t-shirts and button down shirts. Hype sneakers, floppy loafers, terrible style tattoos, cargo shorts, strappy black booty shorts, floral dresses, and stylish tapered athleticware fill out the mélange of styles that pepper Communion. Many attendees show up with the knowledge that if they want, they can see people they recognize. If they want, it is easy for people to make new friends. People learn about other dance music events and share light drugs like nitrous oxide and weed. But it is also never 185 weird to dance next to a speaker facing a concrete wall for hours without speaking to anyone. The sun sets but the music continues until 10pm when it runs up against the Downtown noise ordinance. After the event, outside the Pourhouse, a younger crowd gathers for the 18+ hip hop night at the neighboring club, Foundation. Crowds eye each other without mixing too much, but the separation is not born of animosity.

Interviews with Centrific Centrific contributes two interviews to this dissertation, both by phone. We talk primarily about Communion, but this includes its becoming. Communion has been running since 2007. It is an event positioned at the intersection of many other events. It aspires to be of a serial event weekend and is effective in those aspirations.

The thing about a party that happens in the morning, you have to have some serious steam from the party that’s the night before. The night before has to be ridiculously good to end up with hundreds of people ready to party at 7am. And you have to get those people to relocate, and the next party has to be just as good or better than the previous party. That’s a really hard thing to create. (From interview with Centrific)

Communion is predicated on its relations to other events that are not Communion. It is supposed to be one event among others, and its role in this capacity has both persisted and changed since its inception almost fifteen years ago. It’s relations to other events are different in 2019 and 2020 because so many of those events have turned over, venues have changed, and community attitudes towards amplified house and techno music wiggle about. Nonetheless, Communion still realizes the ethic of weekend-long raving in downtown Minneapolis on Sunday afternoons, without the weekend of raving.

Darkness [Out of the] Communion is a licensed bar event that takes place in the full light of day. It is not hiding anything, nor does it set out to flaunt arbitrary ordinances or legal strictures. Its raison d'être is to occur, and it leaves the shadowy grey areas to other events with which it maintains relationships. These events don’t often see the light of day so integral 186 to Communion because they are sometimes incompatible with the everyday functioning of their environments. Because of this, most events end early in the morning. Centrific discusses this dynamic.

Mostly it’s been like 6am ya know? That’s when it gets light out. A lot of times parties are at warehouses, and sometimes the warehouses share space. It’s very likely that at a warehouse party there might be a business in that warehouse that’s open during daytime hours. There might be an adjacent warehouse that uses the same parking lot during the day. There are a lot of little things to attend to when you’re doing things that are not legal and you’re trying to bend the rules, walk a lot of grey lines. There’s just a lot of games that you kinda have to play to be able to do this stuff. (From interview with Centrific)

Centrific invokes the grey area between the allowances of the darkness of night and the legal realities of the light of day in discussing warehouse events. This is a line that Intellephunk sometimes walks with one-off events, but it is not among the primary worries of Communion, which takes place in the full light of day. Instead, Centrific sticks to visible, legal channels when it comes to this event. Of course, this doesn’t guarantee avoidance of any and all conflicts. The uptick in residential buildings occupying downtown, and the immediate vicinity of the Pourhouse, has resulted in a similar uptick in complaining residents.

There have always been a couple people who would complain about noise from Communion. But I just kinda figure, we’re one day a week for a few hours, like, put up with it, ya know? Also, if you live downtown, you’re not getting quiet. But over the last couple years, especially last year, there was three or four buildings that opened up right around the corner from Communion and we started getting a bunch of calls. We figured out that one person was calling a bunch of times, so there was actually only a couple people calling. I thought I was gonna have to change everything, and I made a post on Facebook about like, “Fuck this city council” and all this shit. And I didn’t really know what I was talking about, I assumed the city council knew who we were or that we were making a lot of noise, but they had no clue. I had mentioned on my post, “Get ahold of Steve Fletcher, the city council member, and let him know how angry you are.” And everybody, like everybody, got a hold of this guy. Yeah, everybody hit him up. Next thing you know I’m on Facebook, and I see a post from the city council member that’s like, “You ever have one of those days where everybody and their buddy gets a hold of you claiming that you’ve ruined EDM in Minneapolis? That’s 187

the kinda day I’m having”. So I talked to him and he was like “Man we’re cool, we can figure this out”. So then I got a hold of everybody and I was like, “We need to back off and actually thank this guy”. And then everybody was super appreciative of his help. We used to get away with not having a permit or anything, and now we have to buy a permit every week and stuff like that. (From interview with Centrific)

Hosting Communion at a commercial venue and obtaining sound permits for the event is not easy, and it is accompanied by increased visibility that might lead to undesired scrutiny. But it also affords Centrific some leverage, some ground on which to stand, some power in negotiations. With the support of a loyal and dedicated community, Centrific is confident that the event is protected. And sometimes, the freedom normally bred at night, in the dark, discovers people in an alley in the middle of Downtown, in the middle of the day.

Events [Make itself happen] Centrific tells another story of antagonism that he encountered in trying to host Communion above board, this time from a venue owner whose disagreements with Communion’s musical aesthetic eventually outweighed the healthy business it brought his club. As a result of the disagreement, Communion lost its venue, its performance gear, and its sound system. Centrific reached out to the community to rehabilitate the event, and he discovered the potential for the event to sustain itself.

At the end of the day I was like, “I don’t really have anything, but I know Communion is important to lots of people”. I didn’t have CDJs, I didn’t have a good mixer, I didn’t have a sound system, I didn’t have a place to throw the party. Communion entry had been free up to this point, other than for the closing party every year. And right away people in the community stepped up. I had a friend who rented me a sound system on a long-term rental. I had a friend who straight up went out and bought me a set of CDJs. I had another friend who bought a mixer and just let me keep it for the summer. A lot of people just donated all their stuff either on a term of me buying it from them, or whatever. (From interview with Centrific)

When faced with the dissolution of their meeting point, of their favorite dance music 188 event, the community gathers the resources required to sustain itself.

The thing about Communion is, by this point, it already has so much steam behind it and it was so important to so many people, that the party was just gonna make itself happen in a lot of ways. (From interview with Centrific)

When threatened, Communion launches itself from the attendees who have become invested in it.

The Materiality of Sound [Rig] Communion still uses components of the sound system that is assembled by its early participants. But mostly, being able to throw the event every week has allowed Centrific to build resources to improve the event.

In 2013 we rented a system on a long-term favor, and in that time I’ve been able to invest money we made into buying a sound system. (From interview with Centrific)

This sound system is not only used for Communion; it makes sounds at other events in the Twin Cities and in the Midwest, including at a techno festival called Even Furthur. The fact that Intellephunk owns its own powerful, immersive sound system allows the group to tune it, assemble it in various arrangements, and experiment with its effects. And these effects, the ways in which the rig interacts with people’s bodies, are crucial.

The sound system is super important. Physically, the sound system is what moves the party. Having that sound system tuned so that certain frequency ranges are at certain levels and able to vibrate your body makes music at Communion a music of physicality, because that’s what house and techno are. But having the sound actually move you is super important. From before I started going to parties there were always people in our community that were very centered around the sound system. (From interview with Centrific)

Critique [Behavior guidelines] Centrific levels a critique at mainstream music venues nearby the Twin Cities where touring EDM acts often perform, and he describes the role that Communion plays in relation to the events hosted by those venues. 189

There were people getting drugged, and there was all kinds of seedy shit happening where nobody was really making a stand about it, or even making a statement about it. So we started 86-ing people who were connected to any of that from our events, ‘cause a few of ‘em started showing up. For a long time, we never really needed to have announced guidelines for being at our events because we never had any problems at them. But when other parties in town are having all these problems and nobody’s doing anything about it, we put it out there that we’re taking care of these problems. Because we don’t want these people at our events, ya know? And a lot of kids who were going to seedy dance music events previous took notice, and they realized, “Oh shit, here’s a place I can go to hear music if I’m a girl and not get groped”. Or if it does happen there’s someone here who cares. There’s a whole lot more acceptance going on at Communion than at other events, that is more people of color, queer communities, and disenfranchised people. (From interview with Centrific)

In Centrific’s experience, not all dance music event venues and promoters have the safety or well-being of attendees in mind. Some prioritize profit, cultural capital, or their own experiences, so Centrific makes the priorities of Communion clear by critiquing the failings of other dance music events.

Dancing [Latino community] With specific reference to the demographic minorities who attend Communion, Centrific comments on the positive changes that diversity can bring to a dance music event.

When the Latino community came into the techno scene with Solara and Communion, that was kind of when the party started to happen. It got a lot more fun. There was a lot more whistling from the dance floor and stuff, and it just became much more of a feel-good time. Sometimes you get too many white people in one place. It’s nice right now, and I’m really happy when I go to Communion and I look across the dance floor I see all different kinds of folks from all different kinds of walks of life and all different kinds of cultures. (From interview with Centrific)

The quality of dancing at dance music events is dependent on many factors. In the Twin Cities, one of these factors is the achievement of a healthy dance floor diversity. Centrific does not theorize this or attempt to explain it, but asserts it nonetheless.

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Ineffability [Elements] But Communion is not a social justice mission, nor is it only a social space. It is not just a name or an idea or a community or a DJ lineup. Centrific stresses repeatedly that he hopes that the event is bout the music.

It’s getting to be more about keeping it about the music than just partying. In the last couple years I think there was a false pretense that maybe we had more to do with social justice than with the music, and I don’t want that. Those things are definitely very important to me, but those are just guidelines for me. They’re not all I want to think about when I throw a party. (From interview with Centrific)

And although he knows what he hopes the focus is, he acknowledges that his focus is not the only significant one at the event.

A lot of different elements kind of come into play with Communion and making it what it is right now. Part of it’s the history, part of it’s the social justice aspects of it. I hope most of it’s the music, you know the sound system. (From interview with Centrific)

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2.8: The Headspace Collective

The Headspace Collective is not strictly an event so much as a group of people, a music collective. But the collective takes place in series of events: radio shows, DJ sets, barbecues, and record releases. The serial events the group hosts go by a number of names such as Domeland, Dome of the Brave, and House Headz. The Headspace Collective also throws one offs like Bangers for Bernie, a fundraiser for the Sanders campaign during the presidential primary in February 2020. But in many instances, the group is synonymous with the dance music events for which they are responsible. Attendees generally call the group’s events by the group’s name. It would make perfect sense for a person to ask, for example, “Are you thinking of going to The Headspace Collective tonight?” The Headspace Collective is known for assembling a small geodesic dome made from tarp coverings stretched over interlocking PVC pipes to shelter performers and electronic equipment from elements. They throw spontaneous renegade parties with the dome, which breaks down and sets up quickly and without any heavy machinery. At renegade parties, The Headspace Collective runs electricity from of a portable generator or a car. This allows events to take place in all sorts of different outdoor places, with relatively little preparation or staging needed. The Headspace Collective also hosts stages at festivals and nights at bars, but they are best known for this renegade party format: free, outside, and open to all who can find and respect it. The Headspace Collective continues to throw respectful, small scale renegade parties through the pandemic and the riots that seize the Twin Cities in 2020. The following – an excerpt from a short article about the different sound systems that sound during the summer of protests – describes the scene at one of The Headspace Collective’s 2020 renegade dance music events.

Military choppers hover above buildings shuttered with broad sheets of plywood. And spray paint is everywhere: colorful peace signs, “Justice 4 George”, the names of others murdered by police, inspirational claims to life, statements of independence and defiance of authority. The thrum of the choppers and this urgent street art set the tone for one of the first renegade parties in Minneapolis since commercial shutdowns in mid-March. A community is dancing together on 192

Lake Street 10 blocks from the scorched windowpanes and shattered glass of what was, only a few days before, the MPD [Minneapolis Police Department] 3rd Precinct headquarters. A toddler and a dog ramble about, grilled cheeses are grilled and intermittent passersby arrested by the vibe join in the bouncing, twirling, mixing bodies. Dance floor acquaintances greet each other with surprise. No one thought they would be dancing for many months, but the murder of George Floyd and the subsequent police response to protests have hampered the ability of City Hall to persuade citizens that they should maintain solitude for the sake of society. “The whole damn system is guilty as hell!” (symmes, 2020)

Interview with Neil Fox Neil Fox is one member of a four person team that make up The Headspace Collective, but all four members share responsibilities; no one is in charge. I meet with Neil where he lives in South Minneapolis. We drink coffee, chat, and jitter with caffeine and excitement about The Headspace Collective’s relationships to the dance music events flourishing in the Twin Cities.

Events [Promoter schedule] The Headspace Collective incorporates more opinions into their schedule than just those of the collective members. They participate in an event planning calendar with some other Twin Cities promoters and communicate with the community at large about their desired scheduling. These different promoters and collectives use this calendar to support each other, and to strategize regarding their collective ambitions for a season.

We’re [multiple local promoters] just friends with each other and we message each other. Today [Centrific] let me know the dates he’s got planned for all the summer, and he asked us to be on board on the 4th of July weekend. We happened to get in that spot because it’s Elaine’s [a DJ with The Headspace Collective] friend’s farm or whatever. And so we got in the spot. We’ve all known each other for a long time. Most of the people that throw parties around here, some of ‘em have been throwing events for 25 years, and most of the rest for at least five or six. (Interview with Neil Fox)

Neil Fox paints a picture of a group of friends who throw parties for each other, but who have been doing so with the increasing capacity to realize their ambitious visions. 193

These friendships revolve around dance music events. Many of them are defined by the desire for the sustainability, the longevity of dance music events in the Twin Cities.

Materiality of Sound [Powerful sound systems] The size or power of a sound system conditions promoters’ options with regard to what events they can hope to successfully throw, especially in relation to the power of sound systems at other competitive events.

[Centrific’s] frickin’ Intellephunk stuff is super good, and they have such good, big overpowering sound systems that we decided, “We can’t compete with this so we have to figure out something different.” It would seem like we just weren’t good at it if we tried to play the same game they were playing. (Interview with Neil Fox)

Different dance music events have different sound capacities. In the above quote, Neil Fox discusses that different dance music events play different styles of music and cultivate different atmospheres based on the power of their technologies of amplification relative to other comparable events.

Dancing [Healthy] The Headspace Collective is invested in harm reduction ethics and politics. According to Neil Fox, the group pushes a narrative that defends the prospect that dancing should be healthy. And sometimes, healthy dancing requires lower levels of intensity than an attendee might initially expect upon encountering dance music events. Neil Fox describes how, often, The Headspace Collective offers a chiller “second space” at many dance music events for people who want to relax, rest, or reorient themselves away from the heat of the dance floor.

We like to be the second space so people can go to the other space and have “the” big intense thing. But then they can come and they have a break and a place to sit and food to eat, a place to rejuvenate you. Otherwise, I’m old. I’m 42 years old, you know what I’m saying? Trying to go dance for twelve hours in a row is hard? But I still wanna hang out with my friends for that long? And I might wanna go back to dancing after I’ve had a break, so we try to provide that for people. That way I can try to be energized and healthy. We try to get people to be healthy ya know? Harm reduction is a big thing. (Interview with Neil Fox) 194

Neil Fox sheds light on the fact that Twin Cities dance music events are populated by much more than a youth demographic of some limited sort. People of varying ages, fitness levels, and abilities find their ways to dance music events, and some people desire a softer touch than others. The Headspace Collective provides this touch.

Critique [Illicit Drug Anti-Proliferation Act] Because it inhibits peoples’ access to this soft touch and healthy dancing, Neil Fox critiques then Senator Joe Biden’s RAVE Act that seeks, in 2002, to criminalize the distribution of harm reduction strategies and knowledge. This act fails to pass, but it is subsequently ushered through as an attachment to Biden’s Illicit Drug Anti-Proliferation Act in 2003. This latter act allows the prosecution of venues, organizers, and promoters if they host events that look like raves, and one of the ways raves are identified is by their visible distribution of harm reduction information.

A lot of my friends who have been throwing parties for a long time went through a period of time when they could get in a lot of trouble for having that [harm reduction] knowledge and for being out about that? Frickin’ Joe Biden and the fucking RAVE Act. So if you admitted that there was drugs at your parties authorities could seize your sound system, arrest your DJs. They [authorities] were using crack house laws on ‘em [people distributing harm reduction information]. (Interview with Neil Fox)

These laws effectively prohibit the distribution of harm reduction knowledge because of its association with drug use. Neil Fox is clear about his disdain for the logic that underrides these kinds of decisions, that isolate undesirable behaviors like addictions in shadowy corners to better pretend to their nonexistences.

Darkness [Narcotics and pragmatisms] Neil Fox is perhaps skeptical of Biden’s – and in general federal – drug policies because he has his own, personal expertise with the dangerous risks that accompany drug use.

I was a heroin addict for a long time, and I’ve got almost seven years off it now. But a lot of my friends are dead from that stuff. And if they would have known when it was and wasn’t fentanyl, they might not have died. So I’m really into people knowing what they’re doing with their bodies. I don’t agree with a lot of 195

what people do, but I wanna keep them safe simultaneously. So that’s what I contribute. (Interview with Neil Fox)

Neil Fox maintains a personally informed knowledge regarding the dangers of addictive drugs and their almost given or expected association with dance music events. His is a knowledge purposed towards compassionate ends. Darkness is real, for Neil Fox, and there are appropriate and inappropriate ways to engage with it.

Give people the knowledge they need to keep themselves safe, not just prohibitions like “Drugs are bad, you shouldn’t do it”. Yeah, this might not be the best thing for you, but if you’re going to do it these are ways you can do it safer, and ways you can avoid passing diseases on to others. You can know what drugs you are doing and how strong they are so you don’t take too much or you’re not taking something you didn’t know about. They’re my friends, I wanna keep them safe. They’re gonna make all different decisions so however we can help with that, all different ways. (Interview with Neil Fox)

Ineffability [Underground] In the early 2000s, harm reduction follows raves out of the club spotlight and underground. Underground dance music events resist definition, but Neil Fox shows they can be spoken of in multiple manners. There are legal and economic aspects. But there is also an emphasis on performing good music that is not popular at the moment.

I don’t know that we are underground. Kind of. We’re maybe underground adjacent or something, because we’re pretty out about everything. It’s not late night shows or anything. We do all our stuff during legal times. We do just set up in the middle of the yard over there, but that’s like right in the middle of everything. We’re not commercial if that’s what underground means. I mostly play stuff that was popular in gay clubs in the ‘70s and ‘80s and early ‘90s, and that’s not getting a lot of radio time right now. Also, we know a lot of musicians so we have people play who might not have a lot of other avenues or exposure. So our performers are not part of the big overground economy. (Interview with Neil Fox)

And then there is a more literal component. Underground are things that occur beneath the surface of the earth, maybe because they are not tolerated above.

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A lot of places we get to play are basements. So we’re literally underground a lot of times because ravers are kinda like cockroaches, but not in a bad way. We take over spaces that other people don’t want or won’t use, and we’re the only people that will use those spaces. We wanna be loud and obnoxious and people don’t want us to be loud and obnoxious, and sound doesn’t travel underground. So we take over places that other people can’t. So that’s a part of where I think underground comes from, anyways. (Interview with Neil Fox)

Away from the harsh, demanding lights of day, ravers creep and crawl, squeezing themselves through cracks in disused and abandoned social infrastructure. And this mentality is not limited to promoters of dance music events, or even to music. According to Neil Fox, more people than musicians find themselves underground, indulging their secret passions out of sight from the judgment of prying overground eyes.

There’s an art scene and there’s lots of maker people that are part of the same thing. I have a lot of friends that build things, and a lot of my friends have little businesses. They’re overground but there still kind of like us; they’re underground-adjacent and we help each other. We have a pretty good community in Minneapolis. It helps that a lot of us have known each other for a long time so we form a good nucleus and then other people come in. Some people think it’s hard to get to know us when you first get here because Minnesotans are really cliquey. But we all support each other with all of our little endeavors. It’s like, try to buy from your friends first for whatever service we need. If you need something done try to support the network however you can. And it’s not just things that have to do with music, it’s anything to do with helping people that you know who have similar values as you. (Interview with Neil Fox)

For Neil Fox, underground has multiple meanings and applications. It refers to a variety of circumstances that define themselves in opposition to society’s unreasonable demands on people. And most importantly, it provides necessary alternatives to the political ultimatums that jerk people across polarized moralisms.

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2.9 Dance Music Events in the Twin Cities

There’s lots of Minneapolis in that book. There’s an enormous amount of Minneapolis in that book considering that Minneapolis is so small and didn’t really make that great an impact on the larger [US] scene. As a self-sustaining scene it’s important. It’s important personally sure. And it was the way that I saw acres of important DJs. It was an important town in the rave scene. Matos from 4/10 interview

Michaelangelo Matos is a music writer who, in the early 1990s, is caught up as raves sweep through the Upper Midwest for the first time, in earnest. He is a historian of dance music events and he lives in the Twin Cities, so it is hardly surprising that he has a wealth of knowledge about the histories of dance music events in the Twin Cities.

Interviews with Michaelangelo Matos I speak twice to Michealangelo Matos to get historically oriented in the musical milieu in which this dissertation finds itself. He is a historian of contemporary dance and pop music, but more significantly for the interests of this movement, Matos is a regular attendee of dance music events in the Twin Cities. He shares information with me about people, events, institutions, and local conditions that he considers relevant to dance music events in the Twin Cities. And those dance music events, according to Matos, are notorious.

Minneapolis has a very good reputation. We have an extremely good reputation as party-throwers and partiers. People who know about it at all, they understand we have a very good rep. (From interview with Matos)

As a Minnesota native, Matos expresses an understandable affection for the Twin Cities throughout the interview. But he also mulls over relations to dance music events in New York City and in Seattle, both places he has lived and attended dance music events. The breadth of his knowledge with regard to dance music events across the US and the specificity of his familiarity with dance music events in the Twin Cities make him a valuable contributor to this project. And to top it off, Matos is a sometimes DJ at Freak Of The Week. 198

Darkness [Indicative of raves] As an aspiring raver in the early 1990s, Matos is always on the lookout in various Twin Cities record stores and music venues for flyers advertising the arrival of raves in the Upper Midwest. For Matos, darkness is one primary indicator of what kind of dance music events he is attending. His first attempt to find a party is close to what he wants, but he knows by the lighting that it is not quite right.

I went, and I knew it wasn’t a real party. I could tell. There was too much light. (From interview with Matos)

But Matos continues his search for something a bit darker, and because he is reading music magazines and following trends, he knows that it is only a matter of time. Eventually his persistence pays off when he comes across a more promising event.

So I went to that, and I was like “this is good, this is cute, but this is not the real thing.” Again, I was already an incipient snob. So I went to another event not long after that, and that was at an actual warehouse. And it was dark. (From interview with Matos)

Darkness is a marker of something different, something new emerging. It is, for Matos, a harbinger of Midwest raves.

Ineffability [Indicative of raves] Unrecognizable music is another marker of what Matos is looking for.

And I didn’t recognize the music. That was the important thing, or an important thing. This is all made up in my head by the way, this code that I had decided. But I wanted to be in this situation where I didn’t know the music already. (From interview with Matos)

Matos has an idea, and it is specifically connected to the ineffability that results from being overwhelmed with multiplicities that just keep on coming, changing, charging past people and into the future.

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Everything was new all the time. If you were playing old records, “What the fuck is wrong with you?” was very much the attitude. It was extremely future-forward. It was rhetorically future-forward. (From interview with Matos)

Ineffability, here, is an unspeakable surplus of music that marks out raves as a distinct type of dance music event arriving in the Twin Cities.

Materiality of Sound [Indicative of raves] Close to three decades later, Matos discusses continuing to be thrilled at the discovery of dance music events in the Twin Cities that express similar characteristics to those he discovered in the early 1990s. The “cumulative effects of sonics” join darkness and unrecognizable mixed music as markers of the dance music events preferred by Matos.

… this was about flow. This was about the tapestry of music, this was about the total cumulative effect of certain sonics, I feel like is much more of the rave ideal, much more the house/techno ideal. And it was very obvious to me that like, these DJs are, these are dance DJs, they do play like that. (From interview with Matos)

Matos specifies house and techno as music that disappears into a tapestry of effects. According to Matos, certain music joins itself especially well to assemblages of sound systems and dancing people and darkness. This is mixed house and techno music, the kind of music ideal for raving.

Events [Lifelong]

I started going to actual dance music events in the spring of 1993. (From interview with Matos)

Like many of the interlocutors and writers consulted for this dissertation, Matos’ career attending dance music events disproves the idea that dance music events are limited to the youthful years of people’s lives. Matos has built a writing career around working with dance music events. But he also develops in them, chases them around the US, and continues to make memories with friends inside of them. Matos savors a memory of introducing a close friend to Warehouse 1. 200

And that was a great night, super, a very fond memory that will live forever for me. It was a bonding night for the two of us. The two of us went out and got happy together, and it was a beautiful night together. We had a great time. It cemented our friendship, and it was also just a great night of partying. It was great music, dancing, meeting people, you know, all of the things you want a party to be. All of the good things. Everybody loose and open and interested and interesting. And you’re there for the music. And you’re there because of the music and you stay for the music. The music is good. Yeah, it was a fantastic time. (From interview with Matos)

Dancing to music at events continues to be a creative, social, and to a certain extent professional practice for Matos to this day. So far, he is a lifetime dance music event attendee.

Dancing Matos describes the dancing style of a prominent Twin Cities promoter who will remain anonymous, but who is one of the people interviewed in this dissertation.

He was a break-dancer. He’s always had that boundless energy. And if you ever watch him on the dance floor, he dances like a boxer. He shadowboxes. That’s how he dances. It’s very very graceful and skillful, but, you know, he’s a very muscular guy. And he makes good use of his physicality by dancing. He’s a very sharp dancer. He somehow manages to weave through crowds without ever touching anyone. He’s extremely good at minding space. It’s pretty remarkable actually. But it also could be just because everybody knows him and gets the hell out of his way, in a way they don’t do with anybody else. Um, yeah. Everybody respects him. (From interview with Matos)

This passage evidences the social recognition that people in the Twin Cities receive at dance music events. Matos describes a well-like promoter’s correct participation at dance music events as always in motion and always respectful. This dancing is indebted to a recognizable style (break-dancing), but it also crosses into shadow boxing and moving about the dance floor. And it also crosses into music that demands different movements.

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Critique Matos is not only a music fan of house and techno, or of dance music, or dance music event music; he is also a critic. His two books cover different aspects of underground and pop music, respectively. This is a distinction that he doesn’t theorize so much as take up, but it is no stretch to write that an aspect of economic critique is overtly implicit in such a consistent distinction across his work. In our interviews, Matos distinguishes between “commercial EDM” and “the audience we’re talking about”, more specifically for example, the dance music events studied in this dissertation.

They’re not the same. They’re very different audiences, and very different sorts of things. (From interview with Matos)

Something that distinguishes commercial EDM is that it is more economically viable than house and techno music, according to Matos. This is evidenced by the guaranteed closing of any attempt at a house or techno club, compared to multiple successful clubs and venues dedicated to other genres like EDM, metal, hip hop, and pop music.

You cannot have a house music club in the Twin Cities. You can’t. Nobody can do it. Nobody is able to do it, everybody’s tried, or lots of people have tried. And I believe it makes people gun-shy to try at this point. You have things like a commercial EDM thing that’s very different and has a very different audience than the one we’re talking about. And this audience does not want to be associated with that [commercial EDM] audience. (From interview with Matos)

It is not clear to Matos exactly why it is that club models are not viable when centered on house and techno music in the Twin Cities. But it is clear that they are not viable. In order to be successful, clubs need to be centered on commercial dance music events. When the model is house and techno, the business fails. When the model is business, the business succeeds.

This dissertation does not report on the prolific creative output of dance music musicians in the Twin Cities, although this group is inextricable from events. It doesn’t do justice to the notorious staff, musicians, personalities who circulate at events, to the 202 crucial venues, to the elaborate mythologies that structure mutual understandings, or to the nuances of music played at dance music events. The six chosen events are not somehow more exemplary of dance music events in general, music in the Twin Cities, or the six reading themes, than other dance music events in the Twin Cities. But the six chosen events should point outside of themselves towards all of these domains to suggest that the relations between dance music events in the Twin Cities extend towards a horizon. Dance music events are much more than conversations, but perhaps the third movement provides a path towards appreciating exactly that continuous broadening of the horizon of dance music events. In the third movement, readers find conversations organized around the six reading themes and fed by the material from the first two movements.

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Movement 3: Conversations

… all composition and performance is a conversation with the material. Gallope, 200

3.1 What are we talking about? This movement gathers and explores conversations that circulate through the materials studied in the first two movements to suggest that the conversations taking place in academic publications are not distant from those taking place in popular publications nor those taking place in event promoter interviews. As it focuses on conversations, this movement looks briefly to theoretical reflections on conversations in some of the works already referenced in this dissertation. Cusset, for starters, writes about how conversations play a significant role in the philosophies of Richard Rorty.

Rorty demonstrates that knowledge is not based on truth, but is rather condemned to the imperfections of representation and to the social and normative conditions that determine its modalities of existence. … according to Rorty, these dichotomies, on which all philosophical examinations have been based, from the Cartesian to those of analytic philosophy, are no longer absolute but always relative to the context and the specific objectives of understanding (or representation), or, in a wider sense, relative to the notion elaborated by the philosopher of “conversation”—that is, the play in the position of the speakers, the search for understanding between a speaker and his listener, an ethics based on specific cases and fortuitous opportunities. (Cusset, 209)

Cusset treats Rorty’s poststructuralism much more favorably than most of the other US scholarship he studies. For Cusset, Rorty’s conversations are productive, generative formats for thinking and constructing knowledge. Voegelin joins Cusset in approval of Rorty, finding that “Rorty’s truths are ‘conversational’ in nature and accommodating to indeterminate dynamics” (Voegelin, 74). Conversations fit her recommendations for a sonic sensibility.

The predicative function of sound, its world creating ability, makes audible Richard Rorty’s pragmatic view on truth, which separates truth from a metaphysical demand of reality as well as from etymology and social conventions, and instead links it to the moment of its performance in language, 204

its conversation. According to him truth comes out of and “endorses” rather than prescribes or presumes social functions and actions. (Voegelin, 73)

According to Voegelin, conversations negotiate and connect truths to the invisible mobility of sonic material. For Rorty via Voegelin, truths are not isolable or static theses so much as interlocking conversations that incorporate new input. Staging, exploring, and studying conversations is a scholarly endeavor familiar to the members of the committee who review this dissertation. Dr. Parsons excavates little studied written correspondences that Sigmund Freud carries out with Romain Rolland to offer a different Freudian perspective on mysticism in The Enigma of the Oceanic Feeling (1999).

It was, in the final analysis, a thoroughly interesting but largely unfinished conversation. (Parsons, 4)

In Shadows and Lights Over Waco (2001), Dr. Faubion reflects on conversations he has with himself as a research-specific personality, and with Amo Paul Bishop Roden, a spokesperson for the apocalyptic Christianity that now presides over the infamous legacy of David Koresh. So Shadows and Lights Over Waco is a conversation among all three voices, or modulations.

One modulation is that of the anthropologist. Another is that of his principal interlocutor, Amo Paul Bishop Roden …. The third speaks for me. None of these voices is altogether distinct. (Faubion, xv)

For Dr. Kripal, conversation is a theme that runs through multiple publications. The Super Natural is one prominent and recent example of Kripal’s fruitful conversations, in which Kripal and Whitley Strieber discuss and reflect on some of the latter’s paranormal experiences. Together, they counter materialist reductions that attempt to explain away Strieber’s experiences.

They [materialist reductions] are certainly the most successful objections. Accordingly, we take them seriously, and we will be addressing them at considerable length as we proceed with our conversation. (Strieber and Kripal, 12) 205

This dissertation itself should lead to a conversation with these three committee members at a defense meeting. That is the ultimate goal of this dissertation; conversation is the effect by and of which it will eventually be evaluated. Finally, conversation is dear to my heart because of the intellectual community I participate in at Valhalla, the bar at Rice University and perhaps my favorite place in the world. For more than a year, in 2015 and 2016, a friend and I host our own Techno Tuesday every week from 12am-2am, without ever having heard of the St. Paul events. We just call it that, show up on Tuesday night, and turn up the sound system for techno and house music. There is no mixing because we are simultaneously bartending, but mostly because Valhalla is better suited to verbal conversations than immersion in the materiality of sound. I cannot say how much the conversations at Valhalla enable this dissertation, but that is not because there is nothing to say about it. I cannot say because there is too much to say. So perhaps, in proximity to Valhalla, this dissertation is not so distant from the effervescent and exploratory conversations on a smoking patio at a dance music event after all. This third movement joins these precedents in using conversations for study, and it organizes them around the six different reading themes. In each section of the movement, one reading theme is prioritized; the remaining five themes contribute to conversations focused on that primary theme until, in turn, each of the six themes is treated as primary. The materials studied don’t claim to invent any of the six themes, and they seldom propose to innovate with them. This movement is interested in the ways the different usages of common themes nuance lively conversations. Sometimes these themes see nuanced points, and sometimes they are used descriptively. They do not always hold the same meaning; indeed, these themes are series of multivocal symbols that populate the materials prioritized in this dissertation.

A last quick note before beginning again includes a few sentences summarizing each section in this movement, beginning with the conversations around ineffability. Ineffability invokes teeming multiplicities, a surplus of presences, of materials, of motions. In these conversations, ineffability is not removed or distant. Conversations about dance music events consistently encounter inexplicable excess when discussing 206 the experience of participating at dance music events and when grappling with the sheer amount of music and events out here. Conversations that invoke darkness revolve around representations of real horrors, self-alienation and freedom, and the emergence of other selves. Presences that emerge in the dark can invalidate the visible, a sometimes horrifying, sometimes ecstatic, and generally humbling experience for people. These conversations discuss dancing at dance music events as participation, not as signification. Dancing facilitates people’s incorporations into connections with artists and performers, events, machines, and lifestyles. Dancing people are people willfully caught up in things bigger than themselves. In these conversations, the materiality of sound specifies the nature of people’s immersion at dance music events. Environments that are immersive and coherent and the relationships between people and those environments (whatever readers take those relationships to be) can come to live in the people even as they distance themselves in time and space from those immersive environments. Cusset bemoans the lack of a public intellectual sphere in the US, but what readers find in the Twin Cities are multiple series of DIY dance music events that, via immersive environments, stage DIY critiques. These critiques are not authorized by any experts or gatekeepers of legitimate or authentic economic and political critiques. So these events push back on Cusset’s thesis that dance music events are only briefly relevant during the early 1990s. Perhaps dance music events in the Twin Cities are an example of the US-based DIY critiques of which Cusset dreams. Dance music events are connected to each other, but also to other types of series of events. This final section puts Krøijer’s kettled protesters into conversation with dance music events in the Twin Cities and the musical protests that see oppressive police responses in Minneapolis on November 4th, 2020. This final conversation suggests that dance music events are connected to many things outside of themselves, and that many things that are clearly distinct from dance music events carry, nonetheless, something of dance music events within them.

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3.2 Ineffability

Walk into a record store, look around, and there’s so much shit that your memory just implodes. Move two blocks down to the bookstore, and there are dozens of new books a day. Spooky 21

The first conversation of this movement revolves around ineffability, as difficult a starting point for a conversation as the unspeakable might be. This conversation draws together writers, promoters, and events covered in the previous two movements to propose that, with regard to dance music events, ineffability is a conversation about proliferating, inestimable multiplicities. In this conversation, ineffable things resist definitions, but are nonetheless discussed at length. This reaction to the ineffable is similar to that which Gallope notes in his philosopher’s encounters with musical ineffability.

In the materials studied in this dissertation, as for the philosophers studied in Deep Refrains, ineffability is teeming with multiplicities and invites contemplation, philosophizing, and conversation. This is certainly true of histories of dance music events. Gholz, Matos and Reynolds mix many stories that point to many more to write history. Gholz supposes that the remixing of these histories holds the potential to open up new potential in Detroit.

… I wonder openly if Detroit has the potential to shape the global soundscape again—or if Detroit’s history can no longer be remixed. (Gholz, 34)

In Klang Der Familie, a chorus of voices discuss history, the passing of events, and even relate incompatible recountings of historical events. All of these collective voices in conversation, and in disagreement, are the history. There is less in the way of a unified narrative than there is of an openended series of events. 208

In several instances, ineffable multiplicity is the nature of dance music events themselves, not only the multiplicity of their historical narratives. DJ Nola acknowledges that “partying can be different for certain people”, and Centrific emphasizes that “a lot of different elements come into play with Communion”. These events are not reducible to music, movement, lighting, or politics, or to any finite combination of these themes. According to St. John, these multiplicities should not intimidate analysts or researchers.

What is required is a nuanced framework enabling the interpretation of a range of behavior …. (St. John 2009, 16)

To a certain extent, Pini agrees with St. John in this. But she would be skeptical if even the most complex hermeneutic claimed to render a definitive thesis concerning the meaning of dance music events.

In order that these sometimes contradictory features be made apparent, it is necessary to admit to the multiplicity of rave culture …. (Pini, 55)

Pini would be skeptical of St. John’s theories that dance music events are, essentially, resistant in multiple ways. Several more people agree with Pini’s thinking and would hesitate to reduce dance music events to even the most nuanced thesis, analysis, or definition. For DVS1, this goes for the promotion of events as for their analysis. He reminds readers that “even if you follow the guidelines and the rules you can still get it wrong”. Saldanha reports a complementary anecdote in which he is overwhelmed by materials that are incoherent with each other, creating an environment that resists any kind of sense-making.

Arun! How do you make sense of all this? I don’t! I can’t! It doesn’t make sense. (Saldanha, 212)

Even Jeff Swiff, a well-connected promoter who makes it his business to stay informed on the contemporary musical dynamics of the Twin Cities, is overwhelmed by the proliferating multiplicity of dance music events.

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It’s constantly evolving; it’s kinda hard to keep up on. (From interview with Jeff Swiff)

Voegelin argues that ineffability is fundamentally rooted in the moving plurality of sound itself.

It [sound] invites us to generate a plurality of things out of its own temporal passing, and in this way it offers us an alternative perspective on objectivity, subjectivity, and materiality. (Voegelin, 94)

Matos describes a feeling that “everything was new all the time” when raves first hit the Midwest. He attributes this perception to the fact that DJs and promoters push the newest records, presumably to sustain the feeling of being lost, awash in music. But even I have felt this same feeling – of being awash in new, unrecognizable musical sounds – since I started attending techno and house dance music events in 2015.

Perhaps the best contingent conclusion for these considerations of multiplicities that effect ineffability would be to rework Wittgenstein’s classical hypothesis regarding the ineffable, which Gallope meditates on in Deep Refrains. This dissertation would like to align Wittgenstein with the spirit of the multiplicity that Gallope and the rest of this dissertation’s interlocutors elaborate. Wittgenstein suggests that ...

Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen. (Gallope, 160)

But this dissertation would humbly amend this prohibition slightly.

Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber darf man babbeln.

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3.3 Darkness

Yet the sonic material brings forth its own nature: a dark and mobile world, ambiguous and unpredictable; a nomadic timespace environment, constantly revitalizing its context or even denying it, and beckoning us in to generate it for ourselves from its unreliability rather than from its certain form. Voegelin, 53

This next conversations revolve around darkness and the sentiments this theme evokes in the materials studied in this dissertation, which are multiple. The first conversation involves discussions of a sort of mimesis of the horrors of reality. These usages of darkness are consonant with Thacker’s grounding examples of supernatural horrors. In this conversation, darkness involves violence, social breakdown, drug abuse and the abuse of people by drugs. Gholz calls forth an example of this implied meaning of darkness when he refers to “Detroit’s dark, spectral, de-industrial, murderous image” (Gholz, 223). Reynolds also discusses darkness in these mimetic ways. But he discovers darkness to be a representation of something fundamentally necessary to dance music events, especially those dance music events he privileges in Energy Flash.

The truth is that there’s always been a dark side to rave culture; almost from the beginning, the ecstatic experience of dance-and-drugs was shadowed by anxiety. (Reynolds, 201)

For Reynolds, darkness is something endemic to dance music events, even if it hides from plain sight. Matos follows Reynolds when he quotes Moby’s opinion that 1994 marks a turn from “idyllic to quite dark” (Matos, 145). But conversations explore conceptual terrain beyond this mimesis of real horrors into less representational relationships between darkness and dance music events. For Saldanha, for example, darkness involves a strong and racialized form of self-alienation. Certain music suitable for self-alienation is described as “dark like a motherfuckin cancer” (Saldanha, 43). According to Saldanha, dark music is lethal to certain subjectivities, namely, those that can afford the excesses required by any death of subjectivity. 211

Saldanha’s darkness of self-alienation is akin to those ecstatic freedoms associated with darkness on multiple accounts. DVS1 refers to this darkenss when discussing his preferred performance space.

I don’t want lights on me. I wanna be comfortable so I feel free. (From interview with DVS1)

Stormy agrees with this sentiment, and they take it out of the booth to a more general condition.

… to strip ourselves of that need to … be self-conscious, that’s where the value is carried in the darkness. (From interview with Stormy)

Stormy and DVS1 find freedom from prying eyes in the darkness, the freedom to express themselves in relation to dance music events and their unseen selves. Garcia transports this freedom to Berghain, and notes that it is respected by club staff.

There seems to be tacit approval by club staff of illicit activities so long as they keep to darkened corners. (Garcia, 116)

In yet other usages, darkness is a relation involving the emergence of something unrecognizable but real. This meaning reverberates with Thacker’s discussion of media that “work too well”, that manifest material communications with between “different ontological domains”. Reynolds uses these implications of darkness in referring to the necessary horrors of dance music events.

… the nihilism latent in its drug-fueled utopianism is always lurking, waiting to be hatched. (Reynolds, 201)

In this formulation, Reynolds invokes the emergence of a darker spirit from the utopian excesses. This darker spirit gains some further definition when Reynolds quotes William James in the latter’s theorizations of diabolical mysticism.

In delusional insanity . . . we may have a diabolical mysticism, a sort of religious mysticism turned upside down. The same sense of ineffable importance in the smallest events, the same texts and words coming with new meanings, the same 212

voices and visions and leadings and missions, the same controlling by extraneous powers; only this time the emotion is pessimistic: instead of consolations we have desolations; the meanings are dreadful; and the powers are enemies to life . . . (William James in Reynolds, 199)

Diabolical mysticism, for James via Reynolds, is the dark emergence of things whose effects bode ill for the people swept up in them. In Der Klang der Familie, the darkness of abandoned industrial buildings marks the potential for dance music events, and the pending emergence a powerful new nightlife economy.

The space was just screaming to be turned into a club. There was something dark about it, forbidden. (Denk and von Thülen, 102)

Other mentions of darkness involve a different emergence; namely, that of the self. In DAM: Nightline Edition, “Nighttime … is about what is liberating of self” (Destroyed Apples Magazine: Edition 2, 6). This dark liberation of the self is a close relative to DJ Nola’s liberation of her dark self.

I have … felt the dark energy, I don’t know if it’s leaving me or if it’s just like there and you can embrace it? (From interview with DJ Nola)

DVS1 is, once again, also strongly in favor of low lighting. This is a crucial ingredient for dance music events specifically because it allows people to do whatever they want, to move however they feel compelled to move.

Take away the lighting so you’re not as intimidated by how you dance or how you freak or whatever you might do. (From interview with DVS1)

All of this makes total sense for Eshun. For him, the darkness lying in wait in dance music events, the emergence of that darkness, and the emergence of the self are all coherent with each other.

… drawing out the madness already in you: this is what the Darkside is. (Eshun, 96)

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Gallope quotes Bloch, one of the philosophers he studies, who meditates on a similar dark, evental encounter with self.

Generally speaking, for Bloch, we are absent to ourselves; we “trickle away” and remain blind to our own potentialities. Through an exacting practice of a “self- encounter,” however, we can become aware of this noncoincidence, a nonidentity, obscurity, or absence intrinsic to the experience of oneself— something he calls the “darkness of the lived moment.” (Gallope, 179)

Bloch’s darkness of the lived moment is strikingly reminiscent of Clayton’s formative experiences at dance music events in Boston.

… the DJs were nowhere to be seen … It was dark … The focus was on the sound, as activated by us dancers. (Clayton, 11)

A great many conversations issue from peoples’ bodies when they’ve been dancing immersed in music and the full confidence that not another soul can see them. For Clayton, as for multiple others, darkness, sound, and the retreat from discrete identities are all also tied to conversations about the next theme: dancing.

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3.4 Dancing

Dancing is a form of listening. Clayton, 10

I have forgotten on what grounds I permitted myself to mark the beat with my foot. This is against my education, and it did not happen without inner disputation. Walter Benjamin in “Hasish in Marseilles”, 125

This section holds conversations about dancing. In some instances, dancing evokes the dialectical connection of flow states that can develop between dancers and musicians. Brady Hill describes this state as …

… the energetic connection that can achieve when an artist is flowing in their natural state and the dance floor is flowing in their natural state. (Interview with Brady Hill)

Gholz cites Jeff Mills using similar language to discuss the relationships between music and dance music event attendees.

… at some point they [dancers] are going to feel so comfortable moving that they are going to modify what they are doing to modify their body to the music …. you’re looking for the talkback from the music that you made or the music that you’re playing and that gives you information of what to do next …. (Gholz, 215)

Music at dance music events does not only perform itself. It incorporates and is incorporated by the dancing performances of attendees. Stormy reciprocates this perspective from a dancer’s point of view.

… when somebody moves to a sound, well they’re collaborating with it …. It’s both drawing them in and producing something else, it’s producing more energy. (From interview with Stormy)

And Clayton illustrates this energetic connection between dancer and music while reminiscing about early dance music events in Boston.

… we did our best to embody both dynamics, fast and slow, in acknowledgment that this new music was asking us to move in new ways. (Clayton, 11)

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More generally, several interlocutors understand dancing as the default participation in dance music events, even while conceding that dance music events are stubbornly multiple. For Garcia, for example, dancing is always the context for tactile intimacy. It is the becoming crowd of a group of attendees through movement that isn’t any one person’s movement, nor is it the music’s. Thornton agrees that this is typical of dance music events.

The DJ and dancers share the spotlight as de facto performers …. (Thornton, 30)

DVS1 aspires to maintain an air of multiplicity regarding participation at dance music events, but he has his own strong biases.

I want everyone to interpret it in different ways. … I would prefer that they’re all on the dance floor…. (From interview with DVS1)

Acknowledging the unavoidable multiplicity of an event – even their own – doesn’t prevent promoters from wishful thinking about packed dance floors without wallflowers. DJ Nola leads by example to make dancing seem appropriate, without bullying anyone into some version of a correct participation.

I try to just be on the dance floor if possible, ‘cause then I can show people that’s what you’re supposed to do. (From interview with DJ Nola)

A last discussion of dancing departs slightly from the sited dance music event. It describes being caught up in ethereal and amorphous machines. One stark example of this comes from Matos’ account of Daft Punk’s Grammys afterparty, where the majors and the underground swirled into each other.

Dancing till four in the morning on a psychedelic floor at a party … the dance- music underground and the big music biz, entities that had circled one another for a generation, finally embraced and said: Welcome to the machine. (Matos, 382)

DAM: Core Edition 1, in its coverage of Fractal Geometry, provides poetics about dancing that mark the coextension of people and the musical machines in which people 216 are caught up, dancing.

Experimental electronics & alternate dance forms. Twitch, shake, & shudder. Become one with the machines. (Destroyed Apples: Fractal Geometry 2)

All this makes perfect sense to Voegelin, from the perspective of a sonic sensibility.

Sound does not establish bridges that relate and differentiate objects but generates the fleshly simultaneity of the world that builds its shape as the formless passing of the entanglement of all there is. Listening is a sensory-motor action toward the world … (Voegelin, 106)

For Voegelin, people are always already swimming in sound. Dancing is perhaps how people harness mobile entanglements and balance movements against other movements in sonic worlds where everything is in motion. Voegelin’s sonic sensibility reverberates with the missions of The Headspace Collective. Neil Fox and his colleagues aim for a lifestyle of dancing and dance music event that is more sustainably than spectacularly focused.

I’m 42 years old, you know what I’m saying? Trying to go dance for twelve hours in a row is hard? But … I might wanna go back to dancing after I’ve had a break …. (From interview with Neil Fox)

Neil Fox aims for a sustainable lifestyle of caughtupness that doesn’t necessarily end when a person leaves the dance floor. These conversations about dancing at dance music events look away from the representational, analytic focuses on dance that ground Meaning in Motion, away from the idea of “speaking through the body” (McRobbie, 1997). They move towards McRobbie’s earlier emphasis on lifestyles that create “a whole way of life, an alternative” (McRobbie 1994, 161). They move towards Eshun’s apologetics of abduction.

Instead of resisting alien extraction, dancing turns it into a gift, turns onto the joy of being abducted. (Eshun, 140) 217

3.5 Materiality of Sound

Sound invades us, impels us, drags us, transpierces us. It takes leave of the earth, as much in order to drop us into a black hole as to open us up to a cosmos. It makes us want to die. Since its force of deterritorialization is the strongest, it also effects the most massive of reterritorializations, the most numbing, the most redundant. Ecstasy and hypnosis. Colors do not move a people. Flags do nothing without trumpets. Lasers are modulated on sound. Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus, 348

Sound is one of the biggest things. Brady Hill

This conversation is dedicated to considerations of the roles of the materiality of sound in conversations about dance music events. The materiality of sound comes into play as the “physical environment” – as Gholz writes in description of Detroit’s soundscape – as the vibrations in which people at dance music events are immersed, and as the relations between dance music events in the Twin Cities (Gholz, 22). The first repeated understanding of the materiality of sound up for conversation is in relation to physical environments, or a soundscapes. Voegelin uses this idea to add depth to the world of visual objectivity.

The soundscape makes accessible, audible and thinkable, alternative states of affairs that allow us to rethink and relive the materiality and semantics of the real world through the possibility of sonic life-worlds that include affection, sentiment, fear, and angst and all those things that fall out of objectivity. (Voegelin, 45)

For Voegelin, people are immersed in more than they can know, but they also sense a great deal more than they know. The soundscape provides the stimulus for certain such inexplicable senses and emotions. For Gholz, on the other hand, the soundscape is less whimsical. It is a physical environment tied to the conditions that specify people’s perceptions of that environment. Of course, these specifying conditions are in motion and they are different for different people. The concept behind X-102’s Encounters the Rings of Saturn can be understood as the physical soundscape of a trip through 218

Saturn’s atmospheres. The record, in “collapsing concept into matter”, speculates musically on the matter of a soundscape (Eshun, 136). Saldanha literalizes this concept of the soundscape in his descriptions of the effects of amplified sound in Anjuna, a third world village with a first world party problem. Often during events, “the music is audible everywhere” but this soundscape plays differently for tourists compared to locals (Saldanha, 136). For the locals don’t readily seek out the psychedelic experiences that contextualize the rave tourism in Anjuna. Reynolds chimes in to suggest that psychedelic experiences contextualize this mixed music and the viscous materiality of sound characteristic of it.

All music sounds better on E – crisper and more distinct, but also engulfing in its immediacy. … sound becomes a fluid medium in which you’re immersed. (Reynolds, xxxi)

Clayton echoes this viscous language when discussing being “submerged in bass lines, blubbery and whaleish” at early dance music events in Boston (Clayton, 11). Stormy also emphasizes low frequencies when discussing the materiality of sound.

250Hz and under is where we really start to feel it viscerally. It’s starting to vibrate the molecules in our body, … you’re feeling it from like the feet up, and all around you. It consumes you. (From interview with Stormy)

In addition to being a viscous environment, the materiality of sound is related in many instances to vibrations. Garcia extrapolates on this at length, considering the different resonant frequencies of different body parts of people.

… sound can strike various zones of the body differently, creating a complex affective pattern of resonances … (Garcia, 193)

Eshun extends this concept to his readings of Sun Ra and The Arkestra. “The crowd is an instrument played by electronics”, not so much by a band (Eshun, 161). The band itself is a passive conduit for these vibrations.

Sinewaves pass through the medium of the synthesizer … through the crowd and then back. (Eshun, 161)

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DAM: Edition 0 takes up the conversation, discussing more specifically the effects of immersion in musical vibrations on crowds at dance music events in the Twin Cities.

… sonic weavings protrude, intersect, serenade, and physically vibrate one’s body, and when groups come together to feel this, it is no wonder that they feel quite literally in tune … (Destroyed Apples Magazine: Edition 0, 10)

DJ Nola agrees, and describes moments when immersion in the materiality of sound is enough to generate feelings of transport to other places.

… when there’s speakers that are loud enough that you can feel … you’re experiencing this music that brings you to a certain place … (From interview with DJ Nola)

Thornton’s contribution to the conversation is a bit darker, or perhaps only a bit more naïve. She compares this retuning, this transportation, this alteration to the effects of drugs.

The constant pulse of the bass blocks thoughts, affects emotions and enters the body. Like a drug, rhythms can lull one into another state. (Thornton, 60)

In related conversations, the materiality of sound is the nature of relations between dance music events in the Twin Cities. According to Jeff Swiff, attention to the quality and the tuning of sound systems is a common characteristic across many events in the Cities.

… main centered music is thriving right now … (From interview with Jeff Swiff)

DVS1 explains this tradition as a material relation that develops at dance music events.

And so I learned from somebody, some other kid learned from me, and then down the line. Whether or not we even know why we do it at first, we end up following the precedent. It’s embedded in us. (From interview with DVS1)

In this conversation, the materiality of sound is big in the Twin Cities to something of its own accord. The materiality of sound embeds itself in people who go on to reproduce 220 dance music events with immersive sound systems. It is a material tradition that vibrates in bodies that have been reprogrammed as dancing ears. The Headspace Collective is one example of a dance music event that defines itself in relation to this big thing that centered sound is. Neil Fox describes The Headspace Collective’s second stage mentality in relationship to “big overpowering sound systems” used by events especially like Warehouse 1, Techno Tuesday, and Communion (From interview with Neil Fox).

It would seem like we just weren’t good at it if we tried to play the same game they were playing. (From interview with Neil Fox)

Rather than competing with the other dance music events, The Headspace Collective offers a supplement. Since everybody else does big sound, The Headspace Collective is free to do things that make all the local event series better by adding something different, namely, kicked back barbecue amospheres. The story Centrific shares about finding the resources required to sustain Communion in the population of Communion’s attendees is a great example of the physical, vibrating, social materiality of sound at dance music events in the Twin Cities.

In 2013 we rented a system on a long-term favor, and in that time I’ve been able to invest money we made into buying a sound system. Those [machines] are the things that make Communion what it is. (From interview with Centrific)

Centrific elaborates on the wonders of having a group of soundscape-specified people who are serially immersed in and reverberating with a sound system they helped to create.

Having that sound system to be tuned so that certain frequency ranges are at certain levels and able to kind of vibrate your body, making it a music of physicality because that’s what it is. (From interview with Centrific)

Communion, the Twin Cities, and dance music events in general spark conversations about the materiality of sound and the relations between groups, people, things, places, and forces, not all of which we can see. Furthermore, this section demonstrates definitively that conversations taking place at dance music events in the Twin Cities 221 tackle many of the same issues that occupy contemporary published and academic work. Academic and popular conversations, published and informal conversations all agree on multiple significant implications of the materiality of sound. But are there any relations between the materialities of sound invoked in interviews and writings about dance music events n the one hand, and on the other hand the arguments Cusset makes in favor of materialist intellectual paradigms?

As an intellectual tradition, materialism is … a practice of making connections, in other words, a practice directed against the myth of isolation, the fantasy of dislocation and disconnection from historical, material, or other contexts. (Cusset, 334)

Can dance music events, for example the dance music events studied in this dissertation, party in agreement with materialist priorities? More specifically, how do critiques of political economies come to play in materialist conversations about dance music events?

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3.6 Critique

DJ music is now the common art form of squatters and the nouveaux riches; it is the soundtrack both for capital and for its opposition. Clayton, 17

One defining dichotomy of dance music is that it is, by definition, populist—and that many of its most ardent fans are anything but. Matos, xiv

For Cusset, the preeminent moment of authentic, resistant, effective electronic music is limited to the early nineties; it dies out soon after it is born. So he might not put much faith in the potential for dance music events or conversations about dance music events to execute effective critiques today in 2021.

DJs in general, however, were in fact also products of a temporary autonomous zone, and were soon to be engulfed by the popularity of commercial “mixing,” and in turn reincorporated into purely entertainment-oriented channels, in which mentioning Deleuze or Artaud would only meet with perplexity or yawns. (Cusset, 258)

Although they initially harbor the critical fervor of poststructuralism, according to Cusset, dance music events quickly lost interest in philosophy. DJ Spooky, who Cusset mentions, disagrees.

By Dj-ing, making art, and writing simultaneously, I tried to bypass the notion of the critic as an authority who controls narrative …. (Miller, 48)

Neither does McRobbie, writing at about the time that Cusset references as the demise of dance music events, detect an imminent end to their relevance. Instead, she uses dance music events to emphasize the burgeoning relevance of dance music event subcultures, even nodding in affirmation to their critiques that remain opaque to her academic analyses.

However, my concern here is with the way in which the magazines produced by fans, the music produced by DJs, the clothes bought, sold and worn by 223

subcultural ‘stylists’, do more than just publicize the subculture. They also provide the opportunity for learning and sharing skills, for practising them, for making a small amount of money; more importantly, they provide pathways for future ‘life-skills’ in the form of work or self-employment. To ignore the intense activity of cultural production as well as its strongly aesthetic dimension … is to miss a key part of subcultural life – the creation of a whole way of life, an alternative to higher education …, a job creating scheme for the culture industries. The point is then that far from being merely the commercial, low ebb of the subculture, as far removed from resistance as it is possible to imagine, these activities can be seen as central to it [resistance]. They are also expressions of change and of social transformation. ... The turn to fashion and music as career rather than consumer choices (no matter how shaky those careers might be) represents a strong preference for the cultural sphere. I would suggest that this involvement can be an empowering experience …. Subcultures are often ways of creating job opportunities as more traditional careers disappear. In this undocumented, unrecorded and largely ‘hidden economy’ sector, subcultures stand at one end of the culture industry spectrum and the glamorous world of the star system and the entertainment business at the other. If, for the moment, we deconstruct the notion of resistance by removing its metapolitical status …, and if we reinsert resistance at the more mundane, micrological level of everyday practices and choices about how to live, then it becomes possible to see the sustaining, publicizing and extending of the subcultural enterprise as a way of attempting to earn a living within what has been described as the aestheticization of culture …. The buying, selling and producing do not take place in a vacuum. They are integrally connected to much longer chains of meaning and value systems. (McRobbie 1994, 161-162)

For McRobbie, some of the significance of investment in dance music events has nothing to do with resistance or direct critique of global capitalism. It is instead the building of an imperfect alternative. These are by no means the utopian postmodernisms McRobbie expected, but they are some of the ones that are indisputably real. Denk and von Thülen quote an interlocutor who buttresses McRobbie’s thinking with respect to dance music events in the early days of German Reunification.

CLÉ Everything revolved around techno. All my friends had some important position somewhere … in a club, printing t-shirts or DJing themselves. Life was concentrated around the weekend. On buying records, listening to new stuff, painting tapes, hanging around with people. It was incredibly exciting. I had the feeling of being part of it, part of the whole. Of not just being a consumer, but doing and shaping something. It also had an element of cultural criticism for me – 224

going to all the abandoned buildings and making something beautiful there. (Denk and von Thülen, 139)

St. John describes how dance music events are a format and technique for protests that should level more head-on critiques, and he follows “the dance-carnival’s proliferation … as a mode of direct action” (St. John, 234). Reynolds fantasizes about an “avant- lumpen” and Pini elaborates a popular feminist critique of normative gender roles (Reynolds, 127; Pini, 36). And Gholz takes the DJ moniker “paris ‘68”, invoking a direct aesthetic of anti-imperial revolution. Perhaps the most prominent example of head-on critique of capitalist realism across the work studied in this dissertation is Eshun’s writing on sonic fiction, which he confidently proposes as a critique of reality.

Overthrow the Internal Empire of your head. (Eshun, 103)

Eshun’s sonic fictions are brimming with critiques of ideology and capital, tactics for serial reseizures of the means of production of subjectivity. A prominent example is the attention he pays to Drexciya’s assault on the programmer’s central broadcast facility that results in the successful transmission of an alternative communication to the population. Matos discusses multiple Underground Resistance musical mythologies, describing their successful efforts to protect their musical gems from much larger music labels. The critiques in these sonic fictions are clear as day, and they issue warnings to those who would dare to exploit music for money.

To desecrate these ruins and this spirit would be harmful to modern man. For these are things that are beyond the perception of modern world. (Vinyl liner notes from UR-2000, Revenge of the Jaguar)

Jeff Swiff agrees with this sentiment that defines underground music in opposition to something else, in opposition to music that does not render a critique of the capital that produces it.

I think that the underground is the antithesis of a lot of manufactured superstar DJ moments filled with rooms of drops confetti guns and sparklers. (From interview with Jeff Swiff) 225

Here, Jeff Swiff is very close to the critique that Cusset makes of Madonna; they both express dissatisfaction with the extent to which money and the industry of business are involved in certain dance music events and music. At this point it would be wise to draw Thornton into the conversation. Her business, after all, is theorizing the chimera of a negative mainstream. The negative mainstream in this conversation so far is, in very general and charitable terms, something amorphous (even for Cusset) like global capitalism, so Thornton might well call it chimerical.

Inconsistent fantasies of the mainstream are probably the single most important reason why subsequent cultural studies find pockets of symbolic resistance wherever they look … (Thornton, 93)

Do dance music events in the Twin Cities effect any legitimate critiques? How would a researcher ascertain whether specific series of dance music events perpetuate, negate, or combat economic hierarchies? How, for that matter, does anyone determine with anything approximating certainty that they are combatting economic hierarchies? Although Thornton’s points are well taken, it is important to remember McRobbie’s invitation to “deconstruct the notion of resistance” in order to take seriously the critiques and negations of ideology explicit and implicit in the material studied in this dissertation (McRobbie 1994, 162). Taking up this invitation to deconstruct resistance in a decidedly constructive register, Saldanha proposes suggestions for Anjuna’s local government. These are socioeconomic and political suggestions that level critiques at those who profit from dance music events as well as those who would ban them. And Saldanha does not let the former group off easily, by any means. In a pragmatic response to the protests of those in support of dance music events for the authenticity with which they oppose authority, Saldanha poses a difficult question.

If negotiation and exposure are deemed to threaten Anjuna’s “authenticity,” it should be asked how authentic the present state of affairs is. (Saldanha, 204)

Saldanha is perhaps wise to seek some stability in permits because relations between 226 governments and dance music events can turn sour quickly for dance music events. Neil Fox discusses the fallout from the legal prohibition of rave-style dance music events in the US in 2003. In this fallout, the distribution of harm reduction information at dance music events becomes a prosecutable transgression.

A lot of my friends who have been throwing parties for a long time … went through a period of time when they could get in a lot of trouble for having that knowledge …. (From interview with Neil Fox)

Neil Fox’s disillusionment with the legitimacy of the US federal government, especially in its domestic judicial capacities and preoccupations, bears traces of Kodwo Eshun’s sentiments regarding governmental handling of the darkside from More Brilliant than the Sun.

The Old World loses all seriousness when it insists that you don’t have to take E to know it’s bad for you. This sensible ignorance is precisely what invalidates it. Every word the government speaks deletes itself. All its expertise disqualifies it. (Eshun, 96)

What, then, does critique without an expertise that would disqualify it sound like? Might it be something like the critiques discussed by promoters of Twin Cities dance music events? These are not critiques rooted in the study of academic texts, of global economics, or experimental theorizations. These are critiques rooted in the relationships people experience between dance music events and the political demands of their realisms. Nonetheless, these critiques come to ask legitimate, piercing questions, and prove that they are well aware of the political and economic diagrams in which they find themselves. DAM: Edition 0 for example, looks askance to live venues in the Twin Cities, critiquing them for failing to invest in the local wealth of artists who call the Twin Cities home.

… considering the size of Minneapolis, there are far too few venues willing to invest longterm in the genius of the local electronic music scene and create a reliable home for forum to convene and public to converge. (Destroyed Apples Magazine: Edition 0, 3)

DJ Nola voices another local critique with respect to the DIY dance music event series 227 in the Twin Cities. She listens skeptically to the economically viable models of loud music, of centered sound, because she feels that it is not done well.

I have an issue with sound systems here ‘cause they’re either like too loud or sound terrible. (From interview with DJ Nola)

She joins The Headspace collective in offering alternatives to the centered sound predominant at so many dance music events in the Twin Cities. But she states more clearly her dissatisfaction regarding centered sound as an haphazard norm, as opposed to a craft. Brady Hill broaches the topic of gender dynamics that differentiate the dance music events he prefers from those that he avoids.

It’s very flashy, there are a lot of not-dressed girls. There’s a bunch of fucked up guys being dicks. (From interview with Brady Hill)

Brady Hill avoids dance music events where attendees perpetuate normative political hierarchies, which in this specific instance constitute the relationships between vulnerable women and domineering men. At Warehouse 1, DVS1 has guidelines in place to confront and counteract persistent hierarchies (such as gendered hierarchies) and to protect vulnerable populations so that many different people can find freedoms in the clamoring darkness. And he doubles down, insisting that he and his staff act on those guidelines.

And we’re not just saying we’re doing it. We’re actually doing it. (From interview with DVS1)

Warehouse 1’s guidelines detail active policies; they are not, according to DVS1, empty signifiers. Rules exist to take effect and to make people feel safer, not to attract customers or to avoid litigation. Centrific makes explicit this critique that DVS1 implies.

When other parties in town are having all these problems and nobody’s doing anything about it, we put it out there that we’re taking care of these problems. (From interview with Centrific)

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Centrific is dissatisfied with the protections offered by multiple dance music events in the Twin Cities to vulnerable attendees. He suspects that what little protections might appear exist for the wrong reasons, that is, for economic reasons instead of, perhaps, loving reasons. And at this point, Garcia’s thoughts regarding embedded diversity might offer some valuable perspectives.

… a simplistic opposition between homogeneity and heterogeneity can cover over inequities of social/civil belonging by enabling scenes of managed diversity to be misrecognized as discrimination-free zones … (Garcia, 326)

That is, Garcia reminds readers that they should not presume that, simply because promoters or event organizers or door people make genuine and concerted efforts to manage the persistent hierarchies and vulnerabilities from which people seek distance at dance music events, does not mean they entirely succeed. This helps along the understanding that dance music events in the Twin Cities are not, in some way, events free of discrimination and other horrifying social relations. They are, instead, events where discrimination and darkness are confronted and dealt with. There is, indeed, substantial weight to some of the DIY critiques at dance music events in the Twin Cities. Legitimate critiques play in creative undergrounds, in the unpublished and undocumented, in the one-off events that survive in the contaminated impressions they imprint, in the reverberations that echo and ring, in nostalgia of ecstasy that definitely was. In the Twin Cities, dance music events with attendant critiques are abundant. There are many more than this dissertation could hope to estimate, and their number is always changing – not necessarily always growing or dying, but always changing. So how would a research ever hope to evaluate the efficacy of these proliferating DIY critiques? Gallope asks a similar question as he contemplates the expansion of music production technologies into ever more populations.

… a modern predicament: a multiplicity of vernacular idioms newly inscribed within an expanded sphere of the sensible. (Gallope, 13)

Whether or not there are any definitive conclusions concerning the nature of all of these 229 proliferating vernacular idioms – musical and critical – they continue to stoke conversations. These conversations often involve an ethos of economic and political criticism – sometimes global and sometimes local and varying greatly in precision – but they are not, in the end, reducible to aesthetic negations. They also debate and construct dance music events and opportunities for participation in everyday alternatives to those everyday political economies that they critique. The next section puts on conversations about relations between those everyday alternatives, those so- called vernacular idioms. More specifically, it frames all of these idioms as series of events.

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3.7 Serial Events

It’s all about how we play with perception of events …. Miller, 13 and 16

Dance music events in this dissertation are connected to each other through the reading themes, through conversations, through moments of inspirations, through music, through production technologies and information distribution technologies, through global shifts in the threat of various military-industrial-academic complexes. These connections are material but not always obvious, like the connections between two installments of the same dance music event series. This dissertation proposes, therefore, to understand dance music events as serial events. The first and most overt illustrations of dance music events as series of events is found in the structures that they provide to several writings studied in this dissertation. In The Underground is Massive, Matos names each chapter after an event. Garcia emphasizes that the phenomenology of any given night of partying, and any given dance music event, consists of a tripartite structure that includes an approach to and retreat from the primary event. Destroyed Apples Magazine dedicates Core Editions to current dance music events by putting their promoters’ words on the page. Neil Fox discusses a different kind of structure with respect to serial dance music events when he brings up the event calendar shared by some local promoters. This calendar organizes series of events into a larger, more cooperative series so that people can arrange their lives more easily around dance music events in the Twin Cities. This calendar organizes serial dance music events into the regular activities of lifestyles. Taking the conversation out of town, Jeff Swiff suggests that in addition to the series of dance music event series that continue to multiply in the Twin Cities, dance music event series across the US maintain and continue to develop relationships with each other, and with dance music events in the Twin Cities.

You start to notice that when you link up with communities around the US they’re all kinda doing the exact same thing. ... And they’re all providing similar spaces 231

through evasive techniques, to people that don’t deserve to just happen upon something. (From interview with Jeff Swiff)

In this excerpt, Jeff Swiff could easily be mistaken to be discussing contemporary protest movements rather than underground dance music events. And upon further consideration, it bears out that dance music events in the Twin Cities do indeed hold multiple connections to protest movements in the Twin Cities, protest movements that are directly antagonistic towards the political and economic conditions that dominate the soundscapes of dance music events and protests both. The last dance music event I attend before the COVID-19 shutdown is Wax Poets at Conga Latin Bistro on March 13th. George Floyd works the door at the Conga Latin Bistro, a bar and restaurant that hosts dance music events series similar to those this dissertation studies. He often pats me down before nodding me on back through the dining room, through the kitchen, down the stairs, to the basement. Floyd stays, of course. He is watching the rambunctious Friday night in Northeast from the front door of Conga, offering steadfast safety and security to people who want to let loose at bars and dance music events. Two and a half months later, George Floyd dies under the knees of four Minneapolis police officers on May 25th. In the days of ensuing chaos and for weeks afterwards, Pimento – once the venue for DJ Nola’s Freak Of The Week (and multiple other local dance music events) – transforms into a center for the collection and distribution of support resources. Staple items trying to make their ways to people in need of food and water, masks and sanitizer, shoes and sweatshirts, and first aid and sanitary supplies are gathered and sorted on the back patio. A video posted on Facebook by Centrific on June 1st, 2020 shows multiple Intellephunk affiliates unloading donations into the patio and assisting with setup and organization. On November 4th, the night following the Presidential Election in 2020, Minneapolis activists blockade a stretch of highway in continued protest to the police brutality that fuels a summer of national and international protest events.28 Shortly after the entire protest of a few hundred people in its entirety gains Interstate 94, riot police

28 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ivTAS3L8j_8&t=9658s 232 block the entrance ramp and the nearby exit ramp, where the protest has plans to leave the highway. Using the highway embankments as walls, police kettle the peaceful protest in the middle of the highway for six hours. Meanwhile the protesters, trapped and waiting patiently on the police to do their slow, bureaucratic drudgeries, eventually start dancing to music amplified by a sound system in the back of the sound truck that was originally intended to amplify the voices of protest chant leaders. One activist feels empowered by the dancing and the music.

We’ve been standing here for over an hour, we’re dancing, and they [police] have no clue what they’re doing. (From Unicorn Riot footage, 2:40:55)

This statement is made not just in the face of arrest, but also in the face of an army of hundreds of police officers with pseudo-military training and not-so-pseudo military armament and tactics. This statement is made in the face of the very real reality of police brutality. And this statement is made to the sound of music. At the same time as this protest, another event occurs in Uptown, on the other side of Minneapolis. A mobile dance party marches along a usually bustling stretch of commercial nightlife on Hennepin Avenue. The protesters seize control of public intersections and community soundscapes to broadcast their contempt with the realities offered by electoral politics in the US. Several of these protesters are also arrested, but not before they assert their dissatisfaction with all possible outcomes of the presidential election that also takes place on November 4th.

The dancing community members, who chose not to organize the party on social media, said they were there irrespective of who won the election; they were spotlighting that they’d learned they could “only rely on each other.” They said they were celebrating the community and power they had been building up during this past year. (From Unicorn Riot write-up of the protest and police response)29

These events are both connected to the music that multiplies across Twin Cities protests throughout the summer of 2020, taking many forms. For weeks, George Floyd

29 233

Square hosts amplified music every day and every night while the Twin Cities continuously gather in memoriam of one of its community members. When the Cities’ annual pride parade is cancelled, an unlicensed and noncommercial Black Trans Pride parade storms through Downtown with thousands of attendees and an Intellephunk sound system that booms out protest chants and music. And highly visible outdoor renegade parties, including those hosted by The Headspace Collective, boldly scatter the Cities throughout the uprisings in contempt of local ordinances, spreading the word of police impotence by emerging from hiding to share Are these events in the Twin Cities connected in any ways to the protests in Strasborg described by Krøijer in this dissertation’s introduction? Addressing this question specifically to the Minneapolis protest that is kettled on election night provides a path forward for conversations. The Twin Cities kettle is perhaps less pressurized than the kettle described by Krøijer, and the former contains many more protesters. But both instances feature groups aligned forcefully and musically against law enforcement due to the effects of the tactics and weapons – in short, the material domination – deployed by law enforcement. And in both instances, the kettling of music by law enforcement increases the effective intensity of the music. Neither kettle is manages to shut the music down or dissipate the energy of the trapped people. A samba band becomes the pulse of a collective body. A kick drum becomes a heartbeat. Both multiply as series of events in series of events. Richard Rorty writes in the conclusion to his 1979 book Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature that his hopes for the book are to help readers …

… see contemporary issues in philosophy as events in a certain stage of a conversation—a conversation which once knew nothing of these issues and may know nothing of them again. (Rorty, 390-391)

Dance music events are events in conversations that might very well already be swirling through readers. These conversations are ephemeral, but they generally return. They are series of events. 234

3.8 Dance Music Events: Religioush?

Itself a network of deviant and hidden knowledge and practice, from magick, prophesies, and shamanism, to astrology, esoteric Christianity, UFOs, and alien abductions, psytrance constitutes a discernible field of contemporary occultism. St. John, 169

No longer is there a great beyond, be it in the topographies of the afterlife or the mythical journey of reincarnation. Instead, the supernatural is embedded in the world here and now, manifest via a paradoxical immediacy that constantly withdraws and cloaks itself. The supernatural seems to be as immanent as our media are—distributed, ubiquitous, in the “cloud” and enveloping us in its invisible, ethereal bath of information and noise. … This is a religious impulse. Thacker, 96

St. John’s description of psytrance dance music events highlighted in the above epigraph often reminds me of the Religion Department at Rice University. Both domains – psytrance dance music events and the Religion Department – incorporate the syncretisms they prefer into their everyday lives; both claim an ethos of removal from the real world; and both intellectualize the relationships between their prized syncretisms and the real world. But what, exactly, is the religiosity of dance music events where people speak without words, where people are in communication before they are aware enough to intentionally play language games? Throughout this dissertation, readers encounter religioush conversations about supplanting the objective light of truth with the paradoxes of the underground and conversations about effective ways to march through chaos and conversations that critique predatory leadership and irresponsible organization and lackluster personal commitments. Readers encounter religioush conversations about the multiplicity of everything – even the searing ecstasy of dance floor epiphanies – and conversations about forces – sometimes sound, sometimes rhythms or beats, sometimes melodies and harmonies, sometimes music – that destabilize people as coherent syntheses of relations. Readers encounter religioush conversations about the coincidences of madness and respect and conversations that challenge preconceptions of safety in order to instill safety, more deeply, for people in the future. Readers encounter religioush conversations whose authorities are just normal people like all 235 other normal people who fuck up, are inadequate, struggle to be at peace with themselves and their worlds. Dance music events are religioush events for some people, but at this point, readers know that they are not religioush for everyone nor are they religioush all the time. Everything is brimming with difference and everything is related and there are many more conversations than these. The six reading themes lead readers to conversations about the material conditions of ecstasy (e.g. Saldanha), techniques and theologies of self-aliention (e.g. in Thornton and Eshun), syncretic occultisms (e.g. in St. John), the ineffability of musical experiences (e.g. in Gallope and Pini), people’s interactions with nonhuman forces such as deep vibrations (e.g. Garcia), callings (e.g. in Clayton and DVS1), communities of people gathered around regular collective activities (e.g. in Destroyed Apples Magazine, The Headspace Collective, and Centrific), the preservation of the sacred ineffability (e.g. in Stormy), and the healthy and meditative effects of dance music events (e.g. in DJ Nola and The Headspace Collective). All of this seems like quite a bit of material to sort through, to measure against different theories of religion, before readers would be able to pose their own questions about the relationships between dance music events and religions. And there is always the risk that incorporating theories of religion into a conversation about dance music events will trigger the absorption of that conversation into a perennial debate about the definition of religion. That is not a bad conversation, it is just a different conversation wherein religion is a fertile frame that embraces many connections and comparisons within its receding horizon. In becoming too enamored with the definitional problem of religion and all the variegated material that it encompasses throughout its long history and extending reach, people sometimes come to believe that everything, in some way or another, might be religioush. This dissertation, in its commitments to religioush nonessentialisms, is all for multiplying definitions and instances of religions. And yet, dance music events are also abundantly fertile frames. So rather than attempting to develop new definitions or theories of religion or religioush things, and rather than measuring dance music events against the yardsticks of religions and theories of religion, this dissertation suggests a playful alternative. This dissertation suggests that rather than attempting to incorporate 236 definitions and theories of religion into evidence of dance music events to determine the sacrality of the latter, readers incorporate examples of dance music events into considerations of religioush things to study the danceability, material immersion, critical dispositions, ineffable multiplicities, darkness, and relations that run through those religioush things. After all, religion has no copyright over social imaginaries, mysticism has not fully accounted for ecstasy, and spiritualities are not the only complex psychosocial relations. This dissertation suggests, therefore, that rather than treating dance music events as potentially religioush, readers treat religions as potential dance music events.

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4: Conclusions

In fact, Deleuze and Guattari would probably be more inclined to call philosophy music with content than music a rarefied form of philosophy. Brian Massumi in A Thousand Plateaus, xiii

Isn’t it obvious that music and dance are the keys to the universe? From “Info” section on the Underground Resistance website

It is sometimes customary, at the conclusion of a research project, to declare that the project constitutes a potentially revolutionary overhaul of intellectualism across the cosmos of thought. This conclusion takes up that custom to suggest the benefits waiting for contemporary intellectualisms that experiment with hermeneutic turns towards dance music events. This suggestion goes beyond an academic apologetics of dance music events by proposing a guideline for the production of knowledge in general. The guideline takes multiplying series of dance music events to be a fundamental unit of existence, and thereby of analysis. In a discussion of chaotic international music copyright laws, Eshun suggests that thinking with music, that taking a musical perspective regarding the history of 20th Century philosophy bears valuable analytic fruit.

Postmodernism doesn’t mean anything in music at all. It doesn’t mean anything. It hasn’t meant anything since at least ’68, when the first Versions started coming out of Jamaica. As soon as you had the particular social condition of no copyright, this 19th-century copyright was already gone, instantly you had the freedom to replicate, to recombinate. That encouraged a Wildstyle of rhythms which would attach themselves and recombinate. And as soon as you had that, that’s postmodernism accomplished and done with, right then in ’68. Ever since then by definition you’ve had postmodernism and it hasn’t been any big deal at all, it’s just already been accomplished. (Eshun, 187)

Throughout Sonic Fiction, Eshun demands different kinds of thinking capable of comprehending the multiplicity of music. He demonstrates repeatedly that philosophical techniques, even postmodernism, are elaborated in the domain of music and dance music events. 238

Further precedent for declaring methodological turns is found in Gallope’s discussion of the useful philosophical alternatives materialism mobilizes against the lingering predominance of the linguistic turn.

The material turn in philosophy, historiography, and anthropology draws our attention to forgotten objects, the secret life of things, hidden engineering, and inhuman forms of connectivity. (Gallope, 252-253)

And Gallope echoes Eshun to suggest an additional musical turn to complement his taste for materialism.

How might music, as in instantiation of a perplexing and productive paradox of the ineffable, share common cause with such challenges to the linguistic turn? (Gallope, 253)

Were readers to use music to read philosophy, as Gallope suggests, they might be struck by how much music exists across vernacular and professionalized, recorded and unrecorded, past and present and future domains. How could anyone ever hope to hear any kind of representative sample of it, of music? By proposing a musical turn, Gallope by implication asks whether an excessive multiplicity might be worth integrating into conversations that do not immediately seem musical. Voegelin would be very down with Gallope’s music and material turns, and for his implied preference for the transmission of their beneficial effects into less musical intellectual domains (philosophy, for example). She advocates for, in her words, sonic materialism. According to Voegelin, sonic materialism seeks to obtain…

… the benefit of a modality of worlds: the ability to imagine and explore the life- world of the soundscape as an alternative world that we visit and come back from with a heightened awareness and a different sense of sound and self with which we augment and challenge the actuality of the landscape and identity. (Voegelin, 35)

Voegelin is adamant that sound art is relevant beyond itself and its aesthetics, and that it must be heard in its participatory relations with landscapes and identities outside of 239 the installation. For Voegelin, there is nowhere for art criticism and philosophy to turn but to sonic materialisms. Saldanha turns even further, to dance music events themselves, by trying “to address race as an event” (Saldanha, 8). In Psychedelic White, race happens in series of events at least as often as the sun rises over dance music events in Anjuna. This dissertation proposes to follow Saldanha in his endeavor, and to propose the consideration of a few things – besides dance music events – as dance music events. First, the frame of dance music events is useful for thinking through lots of things that happen at dance music events. For example: Warehouse 1 is a series of events (nights) all made up of series of events (sets) all made up of series of events (tracks) all made up of series of events (musical phrases) all made up of series of events (beats and notes), which are themselves recontextualizations of prerecorded musical events from the past and from other places into a different series of dance music events. In this framing, everything at dance music events and everything that bears relations to series of dance music events is a series of dance music events. This approach is useful for thinking through the social makeup of groups of people who participate in music collectives. Brady Hill describes how Intellephunk, a group of people, is only comprehensible in its relationship to dance music events.

Intellephunk has a core group – I don’t know exactly what the numbers might be, I think 8-11 maybe – of guys and girls. That would consist of audio engineers, speaker movers, people who do decorations … that make up the machine of Intellephunk to put an event together. (From interview with Brady Hill)

Members of Intellephunk do have social relations with each other, but those relations will resist comprehension if they are reduced to religioush relations or sociopolitical relations. For Hill, each member’s role and identity with regard to the collective exists primarily with regard to the series of dance music events that the collective promotes. In this example, dance music events are the very essential nature of the relations between people affiliated with Intellephunk. That is, the defining relations that run through Intellephunk, when playing with a hermeneutical turn to dance music events, are very obviously dance music event relations that can be described by dancing, ineffable, material, critical, and dark (and certainly other) themes. Promotion, musical 240 performance, dancing, visual art, and people’s creative impulses in general all become requirements of dance music events. Eventually, people begin to seem like little more than requirements of dance music events. Treating the material and social properties of dance music events as dance music events holds a specific relevance for the broad and openended field of writings about dance music events explored in the first movement. Multiple writings surveyed interpret dance music events by treating them as vessels for culture, music, history, subjectivity, religion, and politics; in short, dance music events are debated for the various aspects of the real world that materialize in them. A turn to dance music events urges writers to reconsider their projects in light of how all of these supposed realities – culture, music, history, subjectivity, religion, politics – might instead be vessels for series of dance music events that traverse all of their different writings. This allows readers to take dance music events as they are, in their productivities, in their failings, in their magic, in their machines. It allows people to listen unabashedly to dance music events for their insights regarding topics like human relations and community organizing, metaphysics of music and dancing, the future of human-technology interfacing, and theories of identity and subjectivity. Dance music events have material to offer all these conversations that might enliven them, facilitate critical and productive reflections, and help them connect to settle into multiple conversations and events as alterities among other alterities. This turn becomes more experimental when it is used to think through religioush things. Rather than attempting to understand which aspects of dance music events are religioush, this turn suggests that readers consider which aspects of religion are dance music events, for example, the term “Communion”. The origin of the name “Communion” for the Twin Cities dance music event series is not grounded in religion so much as Centrific’s experiences at dance music events.

Centrific does not name Communion after a Catholic theology; rather, that theology 241 circulates somewhere in his dance music event-saturated soundscape – more likely as a popular colloquialism than a technical term – and is retrofitted as a term for a new version of something that already exists many times over: dance music events. Stepping further into the turn, the Twin Cities might be considered series of dance music events, especially when every Sunday, every summer, Communion’s powerful sound system vibrates the cement and concrete that structure people’s minds. Hearts beating at around sixty beats per minute phase in and out of sync with kick drums that thud at around 120 beats per minute. Critical perspectives in the Twin Cities are always of the light, infrastructure, and air pressures in which they are submerged, so they scramble to submerge themselves in different lighting, infrastructures, and sounds. But even these alternatives are struck through by the materials with which everything is struck through. Finally, in a perhaps excessively folded reflexivity, this dissertation might lend itself to this turn towards dance music events; it might itself be a series of dance music events. It would follow that each movement of the dissertation is a series of dance music events, as is each section, paragraph, sentence, proposition, phrase, and word, etc. In this there are echoes of Kapferer’s suggestions (noted in this dissertation’s introduction) that In the Event is a series of events. But rather than being inspired by a seminar, this dissertation is inspired by series of dance music events. This dissertation is made up of musical materialisms and it is a study of musical materialisms. It is an opportunity to become immersed in the resonances of vibrations that fly through the very air that people breath, thick with dance and intoxicants, because it is immersed in that same air. It shares opportunities to hear how whatever this world is, it is already multiple and will continue to be many more again.

This project is shot through with enough circumstances of impossible, magical coincidence to make me feel caught up in somethings bigger than myself. Eerily, dance music events seem to have known what I am long before I know what they are. But an empiricist’s challenge is so often to remain suspended in a web of possibilities. It is probably too much to suggest that reality does not provide the building blocks of dance music events, so much as series of dance music events provide the building blocks of 242 realities. It is probably too much to suggest that time is the dance of musical events. And it is, without a doubt, far too much to suggest that, just maybe, the gods themselves are dance music events.

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Appendix

INTERVIEW RELEASE FORM

I, ______[name of interviewee], herein give, convey, and assign to Tommy Symmes the right to quote, paraphrase, and otherwise consult an interview granted on ______[date of interview].

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C) ______Tommy Symmes may ONLY utilize my interview for this dissertation project, and may NOT utilize my interview for other future publication or broadcast unrelated to the dissertation without my written permission.

D) ______No future researcher shall be allowed access to my interview without my written permission.