RICE UNIVERSITY By tommy symmes A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE Doctor of Philosophy 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. 2 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 3 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) 4 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.