The Extensions of Noha: rave thoughts

the rave movement and many of the historic drug culture initiatives form from the utopian ideal of collective experience, a loss of ego and a joining into something more powerful than the self. how to reconcile this with the reality of posturing, dance stylings, show-offing, sexual advances - the paradigm of clubbing? does this sort of activity only occur in the interstitial stages, between ecstatic experiences? i remember both types of feelings - the social aspects of being in high school, dressing up in humongous clothing with as much reflector as possible, getting the hottest new gear, dancing to impress the girls, and so on, with times when i was all alone in the middle of a huge crowd of people, epilepsy inducing light shows pulsing almost too hard to take, screaming and sweating and wondering how the DJ could possibly be so good, not even wondering about the DJ but just drinking in the feeling of overloaded senses, pushing the level of experience to the next heights. in my crowd it was all about who could attain the most extreme level of experience with the combination of drugs, lights, dancing, music and surroundings. the first rave i went to completely blew my mind - i was surrounded by the strangest looking and most unimaginably beautiful people i had before encountered - people who appeared to have come out of hiding in some underground or outerdimensional clubhouse to party and show off the most inventive clothing and dance moves, to experience the night with me, only to prance off at dawn back to from wherever they had appeared. where are those people now, i sometimes wonder? did they make it out or was that a final and all-encompassing world for them? was i just an impostor, a visitor, joining into the circle, taking notes in the attempt to bring that experience back for the rational world to hear about, learn from? were those people more real, more a true part of what it was to rave, did they die for the beauty that was created for me those nights, or are they now like me, looking back on a past time and wondering what can be extracted from that experience, digitally recreated and reconfigured for current consumption and dissemination. are they working in tri-state gas stations with blown minds and nostalgic thoughts or was that place a stepping stone for higher levels of creativity? i tell you the invention at these events was incredible. characters created from neon, makeup, fetish and piercings, dance concocted from mime, tribalism, breakdance, and korova wallpapering (Assume Vivid Astro Focus), platforms shoes, vinyl and club kid excess (Party Monster), music designed to play with your senses, to open you up with repetition, so that the aural pallet is then given over completely to subtleties. all the modulation comes in the form of almost subconscious changes, growth, shifting, rises and falls, trickery - build up a form and then tear it down. the tricks with visual perception work in somewhat of a similar fashion it seems - look at something for long enough, and your mind will adapt to it, become used to it. thus when it is taken away or shifted, you will be in a more fragile, receptive state - you will see the after effects, hallucinate at the lack of it. there are audio patterns that work the same way, particularly in techno music, and this technique is what a lot of successful rave music plays upon. Rimbaud - "I played sly tricks on madness."

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I remember going to a first rave in high school and having my mind blown and yeah - what do those people do in the daylight? Because when the lights come up on the neon and the plastic and the glitter it can look powerfully tawdry. The flash needs the night to stand out. Whew.

And then clubbing - what a disappointment! Going somewhere with similar lights and thumping music but little costume and all this posturing and looking at each other and insecurity. How Soon is Now indeed? As Morrissey asked.

When the lights are low, casting shadows of writhing bodies on the wall, people are screaming and laughing, there's music so loud you can't talk, smoke and confusion - it's a lot like hell. I mean really, it's just like hell has been described to me by my midwestern Christian upbringing.

Isolating which (rave/club/chaos) experience is most sustainable, most creative, most provocative - that's a serious project. There are some club scholars you might seek out - Douglas Rushkoff is a great NY-based writer and thinker about mind viruses. He wrote a book called "Ecstacy Club" about the search for enlightenment through stimulation as you described.

Posted by: Justin Hall | January 30, 2006 11:23 PM

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1 of Ecstasy Club: A Novel [Paperback] by Rushkoff, Douglas $0.35

Posted by: noha | January 30, 2006 11:40 PM

...and on the hell thing, Paul Schimmel, curator of the Ecstasy exhibit writes, "although in their heyday raves may have been more about hedonism - a holiday in an altered state - than about mind expansion, ...[they] have at their source a fundamentally utopian impulse..." perhaps the path to nirvana is through hell???

Posted by: noha | January 31, 2006 12:39 AM

You could research this whole constellation of topics indefinitely - ecstacy, wisdom, excess, stimulation, nirvana. Whoo-ee! Maybe your research is your thesis? Documentation, at least.

William Blake.

Posted by: Justin Hall | January 31, 2006 10:25 AM

I remember the first time I heard that thump-tst-dump, Chicago, 1993, Boystown.

I believe the name was Lady Bug.

Obviously it was dark, but amongst this darkness were beams of lights and throbbing bodies engaged in some neoritual. What had we stumbled upon? We spent the night passing energy balls around our body, the glowing at that point had become apparent.

Two Screens
Arrays of laser lights
Rolls, LSD, and the bodies pumping in the reddening darkness
A fog machine to boot
And we were dancing all night

We drove back to Maria’s about 5

It didn’t stop there either. I kept going for years, in Chicago and Detroit. Friday morning senior of high school I found a flyer in my pocket “FURTHER: it said. Rainbows and no secret hotlines, it was legit. An old skit resort rented somewhere in the woods of Wisconsin, massive 3-day ravewith12 tents of House, jungle, Trance, Drum-n-bass etc, this was the general picture. I smiled.

My friend Ben and I left school immediately and headed north.

We drove about 5 hours and found ourselves pulling past a band of natty, pierced, big-pants wearin’ neohippies, but just past them was the valley, and just like the hotline said, twelve tents on various hills. We dosed and danced by fires all the night whilst moving in and out of surreal worlds painted by light and thumping in the night, angels and devils swindled in the swirl of our elctroprimitive state.

What does this have to do with your project?

I found literature there, plenty of it, high-end zines, and they spoke of a new dawning, a rebirth of humanity; in a similar fashion as the counter culture of the 60’s. From what I can take away from those times, it was about coming together in a new way, creating new rituals, and trying to change our own humanity.

The parties were not utopian, but they had this wonder feeling of coming together to share in expression.

The rave became a cooperative artistic expression through light, music, dance, sound, and presence; a great gong in the cold concrete of the urban night.

While half of the experience was passive, a user has tremendous agency in acting upon the stage that is the floor.

All the parties I can remember, less the more hip-hop oriented ones the late 90’s, the planners made a significant effort to hid the DJ, tech, and VIP of course, away from the crowd. Without a mediator centrally focused, it created this stage for the audience to engage and interact with each other and new media. The rave was an interactive gallery for current digital street art, guised as a party; festival would be a better term. They were celebrations of being.

Posted by: SEDinehart | February 15, 2006 08:39 PM

The Extensions of Noha

rave thoughts

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