september 2023: Locked in a ChatGPT groove

I've been thinking about two things:

1. The concept of catharsis

2. Wondering what purpose locked grooves on vinyl records serve, other than novelty.

I feel like these two things may either be connected, or perhaps the inverse of each other. Can you help me make sense of this?

Locked grooves can create a form of catharsis through repetition. The constant replaying of a particular musical segment can lead to a meditative or trance-like state, allowing the listener to immerse themselves in the music and possibly experience emotional release. On the other hand, one might argue that locked groove records could be seen as the inverse of catharsis. Instead of leading to emotional release, they can lead to emotional stagnation or frustration due to the lack of progression and variety. In this sense, the relationship between catharsis and locked grooves could be a dynamic interplay between immersion and stagnation.

OK. You’ve helped illuminate where my thoughts were headed. A locked groove is an immersion, yet it’s ultimately confining. One must physically lift the needle to find release (or relief) from this endless loop. There’s no resolution without this intervention, and this intervention rips you out of immersion.

This idea is metaphorical. It can be a representation of emotional stagnation or a trapped state, which contrasts with the cathartic experience that art, particularly music, aims to provide. In this way, the comparison between locked grooves and catharsis becomes an exploration of how artistic concepts #can reflect and illuminate our psychological and emotional experiences.

It’s funny. I’m a person who has always loved chugging, loop-based music with little variation. Honestly, the slower and same-er the better. Once I took a non-club friend to a deep tech night, and they said that over the course of the night the music sounded like one single loop with no variation. I was surprised by that. Like, I hear the repetition, but it doesn’t feel meditative or trance-like in my ears. Every anticipation of the next loop feels different to the one before it. There’s suspense and drama in those moments.

In this context, the locked groove record metaphor might still hold, but with a twist. While the looped repetition may not lead to a grand cathartic release, it creates a series of micro-experiences, each with its own emotional charge. These micro-experiences contribute to the overall narrative of the music, offering a textured emotional journey that doesn't follow the traditional patterns of build-up and release.

I like what you're saying, that rigid loops can offer their own micro-catharsis. I remember telling someone once that I liked STL's productions, and they replied ‘yeah they’re cool, but they're tool tracks’. We had to agree to disagree.

Your experience highlights that even within the constraints of repetition and minimal variation, there can be a wealth of emotional and intellectual engagement for listeners who appreciate the subtleties, the tension, and the unique journey that each loop offers. The fact that you've found value, depth, and even micro-catharsis in loop-based music challenges the notion that these tracks are merely tools for DJs.

Um. You’re beginning to sound a little.. repetitive.

Thank you for pointing that out.

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july 2023: ode to (black, femme) joy

The joy is in Adeva. It’s palpable as she serves up familiar soul lyrics over a gospel house beat and Grace Jones aesthetics. The joy remains despite her having to issue a verbal “Warning!” or rail against a beau’s empty promises, promises, promises. The joy is also instrumental. It inhabits every frenetic atom of fidgety tech in Shinedoe’s classic “Phunk.”

The joy is experimental. It’s on the sharp edges of Loraine James claiming to like the simple stuff, within a decidedly complex and angular sound world. It it cross-continental, it's the east coast of the U.S. and the eastern region of Africa, it’s where Suzi Analogue and Turkana meet, with the bubblegum rapping of Queens D. Light as the cherry on top.

It’s there behind the masks and hazmat suits of Altern-8 rave bangers; from sampling Aretha Franklin’s “Jump To It,” to equal-billing with disco deity Evelyn ‘Champagne’ King on a redux of her hit “Shame,” to showcasing P.P. Arnold in the production and music video of the ecstatic “E-Vapor-8.”

The house divas have it. It's in CeCe Penistion reminding us that he, indeed, loves her too. It’s in Crystal Waters’ commanding and direct contralto.

It’s in the saxophone; from Norma Jean Bell’s inky velveteen tones to Jana Rush’s audacious, curvaceous use of the horn, warping it, pitch-shifting it around skittering footwork programming on “Moanin’”.

It’s in Uniiqu3’s loving dedication to Jersey club orthodoxy, and in Lulu Be.’s genre-blend diversity, shot through with her onomatopoeic purring, ballroom calls, dancehall and Chicago rhythms.

It was in K-Hand’s ebullient embrace of classic house for her series of Project records on her label Acacia Records. Rest, in perfect joyful peace.

It’s in Anz’s sharp sensibility for other decades, in her glittering, gleaming ‘80s pop production with George Riley. It’s in the contrast of an innocent girlish verse against a womanly chorus, cemented by Yavahn in ‘95 on “Everybody Be Somebody.” It’s in Nia Archives brushing the dust and cobwebs off jungle conventions, and Rochelle Jordan’s reinvention of the sultry dance music chanteuse for a modern era.

Too many attempts have been made to separate the joy from its identity, too many times. But it’s resolutely there - in the uncredited voices and elegant lip-syncing of model beauties in hit Eurodance music videos. It is the scaffolding around our femme, queer Ugandan siblings of the Anti-Mass Collective, who now face the cruellest of threats.

It is an unbroken continuum. From Fonda Rae’s iconic pipes on “Touch Me” and “Living In Ecstasy,” to Sherelle mashing up horns and piano chords and whistles on “Jungle Teknah,” a Frankensten’s monster of rave maximalism, to the face-melting industrial techno chaos of Femanyst’s “Bat Shit.” It is Beyoncé inviting Madonna in, to recalculate and reprogram what she stole with “Vogue.” It’s the lifeblood of NIKS & T-N’s Synergy.

Black femme joy perseveres in spite of, not because of. It is in the gallows humour of Crystallmess, clashing minor and major keys, informing us that “Just Because It’s A Funeral Doesn’t Mean We Can’t Rave.”

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May 2023: Kincy’s Hauntology

From the short, dense, outstanding musical output of house producer Gemini, his 1999 record “Swimmin' Wit' Sharks” contains a premonition of his own fate. Beneath the track’s finger snaps and rubbery, liquid oddness, the artist also takes on the role of rapper, admonishing the shadiness that surrounds via rhyming couplets. “Instead of trying to understand me, you look me in my eyes and try to underhand me?” he asks. Later stating, “I know it’s all about business for y’all, and I can forgive this, but please bear witness to what happens when you try to diss this…” It was one of the last records Spencer Kincy released before abruptly withdrawing from music, and, seemingly, from his own life.

Kincy was an integral figure in the second wave of Chicago house, emerging from the city’s warehouses and clubs alongside fellow DJs Boo Williams and Mark Farina, producing for the record labels of peers like Cajmere’s Cajual, and Derrick Carter’s Classic. While all of these artists were able to stake out a unique persona, Kincy was the eccentric of the bunch, turning out productions that had all the hallmarks of deeper, jacking house while being undeniably off-kilter. His signatures were unusual note progressions, kick drums that were a touch too dominant, psychedelic synths, sweeping, shooting and tweeting sound effects, hints of jazz or electro where they’re least expected. It’s sadly ironic that his singular futurism vanished at the same moment as we crossed the threshold into the tech-fetishism of Y2K.

Rumour and conjecture about Kincy’s fate have swirled ever since. The only credible information to be published about him over the last two decades came from Chicago’s 5 Magazine, which reported some direct yet irregular periods of contact. The broad strokes were bleak: he suffered with financial and housing precarity, and periods of what appeared to be acute mental health crises. Yet as a house music comeback began gathering steam in the early 2010s, and with no meaningful advocacy for Kincy in place, some particularly gutless and heartless actors began mining Gemini’s ‘90s catalogue for gold. Reissues abounded, with vague platitudes from record labels about holding on to royalties for Kincy on his behalf. “There is now a veritable cottage industry built up around Spencer Kincy. Spencer himself has no part in it,” wrote 5 Magazine’s editor Terry Matthews, in 2012.  “It really does feel like a man unfairly cut out of history has been pasted back in. But who’s doing it, and how it’s being done, is what’s troubling me.”

The commodification of Kincy’s work hits multiple pain points. The music industry at large has a long and terrible history of exploiting Black artists, and electronic music is no exception. There’s also a specific type of ghoulish interest that develops, with drooling intensity, whenever Black cultural output is attached to tales of trauma and distress. However the desire for Kincy’s triumphant comeback may not be lost. A UK-based label named Anotherday, which is purportedly either Kincy’s own or his choice of licensing partner, has been gradually reissuing his productions, which they maintain is done with his consent and collaboration, to  generate some income. While there is now, finally, a more ethical outlet for Kincy’s work, another tender spot is simply a sense of loss over what could have been. Or, as The Oxford Handbook of Music and Virtuality defines hauntology, a "nostalgia for a future that never came to pass.”

References:

Whiteley, S. and Rambarran, S. (2016) The Oxford handbook of music and virtuality. Oxford University Press.Vancouver

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March 2023: Dear laura, …

What a tender joy it was to be surprised by you handing me that honour last November, and then to read your thoughtful note in December. I carried the message of your December column with me - sometimes it might be good not to archive everything - to the other side of the world and back. It echoed in my mind as I exfoliated existential grief(s) in the sea, and burned away layers of psychic weight under a hot sun. You encouraged me to interrogate the nature of some of my own compulsions to document and defend.

One definition of ‘archive’ describes a “documentary by-product of human activity, retained for its long-term value”. I realise now that painstaking documentation and retention is only half of the picture - there must be a perceived value, and this isn’t something that can simply be enforced from the outside. After re-reading your words, I feel like some link can be found between this value and the type of circularity you identified: both in Alok Vaid-Menon’s generative quest for queer histories, and in the music and DJ mixes that move us both. Timing, context, and sometimes sheer novelty must intersect with these artefacts. It could be, as you said, as serendipitous as Josh Cheon fishing Patrick Cowley tapes out of his attic long after they were made, or perhaps in reinscribing the story of acid house to accommodate the early experiments of Charanjit Singh. In December, when I read about Manuel Göttsching’s passing, I immediately dusted off my copy of E2-E4 and as I listened I was warmed thinking of all the other folks who must be engaged in the same ritual at the same time: stepping back into the familiar quicksand trance of that album’s journey, enculturating those endless loops with a new melancholic value, deconstructing and relearning what was already familiar.

This all makes me think of the excellent television series I just finished watching, Station Eleven. It depicts a post-apocalyptic, post-pandemic, post-industrial world where only 1% of the human population has survived. A troupe of theatrical performers travels by foot in caravan formation around one of America’s great lakes every year, performing Shakespeare for scattered, scarred, cobbled-together communities. The players (and their audiences) uncover something new and profound with each performance of the same text, and in one crucial scene a makeshift museum of pre-apocalypse ephemera is burned to the ground; a symbolic sacrifice made to allow for life to truly begin again. In the show, it is the circularity itself that holds the potential for true healing, not the memorialising of an original wound. I hope this means there’s some unknown future value in asking Belleville Three, or any of our elders, to again circle around the histories that have been told so many times before. You asked me what I want to leave behind from 2022. My answer now is: nothing that I do value or could value.

For now, slow, deliberate loops and repeated listens are gently governing me back towards a sense of place. I’m luxuriating in the slow nod of Paul St. Hilaire, the narcotic funk of DJ Screw (RIP) and DJ Python mixes, and while everyone reminisces about their hot amapiano summer, I’ve cosily crawled back inside these productions for their bluesy spaciousness and minimalism.

I look to the remainder of the year with no expectations, but I do hope the next glance you cast across the dancefloor might catch mine. Until then, I’ll see you here, again, sometime soon.

Love, Christine

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January 2023: griefstep

“Heal yourself and move.”

Theo Parrish

Where in your body does the grief reside? Has it turned your bone marrow to lead, dragging your gait with its heaviness? Is it a boiling belly that violently scorches with rage? Has it stretched your skin so thin that there’s nothing but a fragile membrane between your nerves and the outside world? Perhaps it folds over you, subsuming you, until you’re abruptly ejected, gasping for air. Maybe it’s rendered you hollow, leaving you in perpetual peril of being crushed.

Nobody has escaped being impacted by the last three years, but there was something about that ‘22 vintage that felt especially diminishing and regrettable. In 2020 we swore that we wouldn’t end up back here again, but last summer we screwed our eyes shut and pinched our noses anyway, then blamed muscle memory for bringing us back to where we started. Once we opened our eyes we encountered a view even uglier than what we remembered. The disorientation of that journey hung around for too long, mutating into a vertiginous nausea. The same abuses, toxicities and exploitations remained steadfastly in place, but now they’re openly fuelling villain era narratives. It’s only in hushed, private conversation—hushed in case anyone else might be listening, but no one ever is, because they’re too preoccupied with their own grief— that we even dare reveal a common desire to not want to do this any more.

Grief is shitty, immobilising, inconvenient. It’s selfish, it walls you off, lies to you that nobody understands your internal world; it is unhinged with its hair-triggers and hauntings and miscalculations. But grief can also rebuild you at a cellular level, if you let it. The weighted down sensation can reveal a new perspective of the world that’s lower to the ground. Volcanic eruptions expel things that have been aching to be dislodged. While the thin-skinned risk being bruised, they also risk getting closer and more tactile with others.

bell hooks, of course, knew all of this deeply. In A Woman's Mourning Song she wrote that actively expressing grief is “essential to any experience of spiritual ecstasy.” In the devastation left behind by previous traumas and pandemics, there are clues to illuminate the path forward. In 1988, as the incidence of HIV diagnoses was gathering at a horrifying pace, Gwen Guthrie’s “Can't Love You Tonight” was unequivocal about its loss and lamentation:

“Your body, so appealing (baby),

But I've lost that lovin' feeling

Surgeon General says

We've got to use our heads,

Tonight (got no time for passion)

I can’t love you tonight,

Love is no longer free.”

The existential threats being levelled at us are many. We are at risk as corporeal, biological, ecological, psychological, political, societal beings. Our habitual grasping towards scarcity paradigms, wealth and growth fetishism, the exploitation of art and workers, libertarianism, the over-indexing of fame … all of this only condemns us to this queasy reality.

We need time to heal out loud, then move.

In the chapter titled “Healing: Redemptive Love” in All About Love: New Visions, bell hooks again invites us into her tender truth. “After we have made the choice to be healed in love,” she writes, “faith that transformation will come gives us the peace of mind and heart that is necessary when the soul seeks revolution. It is difficult to wait…when we surrender to the "wait" we allow changes to emerge within us without anticipation or struggle. When we do this, we are stepping out on faith.”

References:

hooks, b. (1993) A Woman's Mourning Song. Writers & Readers.

hooks, b. (2001) All about love: New visions. William Morrow, New York.

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NOVEMBER 2022: DEAR LAURA, …

It was so good to see you the other week. I’ve been thinking a lot about our conversations, both in person and in the folded up corners of this flyer.

I watched a documentary about heavy metal, and it made me think about your column on transcendentalism. Someone in the video spoke about the catharsis of hearing metal live, while a birds-eye view of a concert showed a section of the crowd running anticlockwise in tight formation, forming a circle pit. From that perspective it looked like some ritualistic entity; a communal whirling dervish, or a human murmuration. It’s clearer than ever to me now that there’s a need for some divinity in all of our tiny worlds.

You highlighted a great point in that piece, about Black Futurism and its capacity through artists like Sun-Ra and Drexciya to conceive of other timelines and lifetimes. There’s a great quote by the artist Arthur Jafa: “Black people figured out how to make culture in free-fall”. I feel like there’s a link to be made between this and the spirituality that sits at the root of our scene: when your existence on earth contains no semblance of a safe harbour, looking towards the outer reaches of possibility becomes both a balm and a survival strategy. I don’t care about techno dinosaurs perched on mountains - launch me into deep space with X-102’s Discovers The Rings Of Saturn as my only accompaniment :) I learned today that with that record Mike Banks, Jeff Mills and Robert Hood invented the vinyl locked groove. Imagine desiring to transform the listening experience so markedly and conceptually that you can look directly at the familiar technology in front of you, and see the possibility of something new!

On a related note, your column about Patrick Cowley made me consider just how many crucial intersections there are between technology, musical innovation, sensuality and marginality. Like, what if there were no brothels in New Orleans’ Storyville? Would jazz even exist? Likewise, if not for the heady spectacle of sex and athleticism in southern strip clubs in the US, trap would not be recognisable. It’s hard to imagine where we’d be as club culture without the closed, secure, discrete spaces used as dark rooms and bathhouses. I like to imagine the energetic feedback loop between these audiences and the nimble hands and risk-taking of Larry Levan, Frankie Knuckles and Ron Hardy on a reel-to-reel. Of that era, I’m always drawn to the work of Walter Gibbons. I think of him as that time’s Little Richard--wild and unbridled, wielding his razor blade edits, weirding everything up with Lee Perry style flourishes, before he turned his back on disco and gayness to devote himself to God. He was already in isolation by the time he remixed Strafe’s “Set It Off”. I hope he could still feel the electrifying impact of that edit in those critical, life-saving spaces, even as he quietly waged his own private battle with AIDS.

One question that becomes ever more urgent to me is how to properly archive all of these truths and traumas and radical catharses? How can we tenderly carry them close to our chest, but leave ourselves enough space to be expansive and generative? I have no answers, but I do have a track to help mull the question: “V” by Nkisi contains multitudes; it reaches across and behind time.

It’s a small piece of divinity that helps me float away from this sometimes hellish earth.

I’d love to know what's keeping you grounded, or aloft, or perhaps both at the same time.

With love,

Christine

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September 2022: I want to, see through u

I can’t tell, yet, if this is more than a trend. But I’ve noticed something recently. On social media, folks in my friendship circle have shared three unrelated posts, all of which point towards the same idea.

In July, Berlin queer rave collective fluid.vision shared a gallery post titled ‘Money Transparancy’. The slides that followed telegraphed a “recommended” entry price for their next event to allow them to cover expenses while paying artists fairly and equally, and also made clear that the party would be entirely self-funded. There was an additional affordable provision, because, they cutely state: “If money is a concern, and you find yourself rounding corners at the end of the month, just pay 10€, no need to explain.”

A few days later, New York based DJ Lychee posted a financial breakdown of Antidote, an “intimate, semi-private, queer-focused early evening event in a cozy space,” that they hosted in Brooklyn. Prefaced with the caveats that the intention of the party wasn’t to reap profits, and that DJ Lychee has a buffer of privilege due to personal savings and a day gig in the tech industry, the stats provided in the post were stark: Antidote’s expenses outstripped the total income of the event’s ticket sales, sliding-scale door entry and donations by almost $2000.

A third post made the rounds days after that, by British DJ, junglist and vocalist Sheba Q (who, side note, is no slouch on the production side either: check the narrative jazzy impressionism of “Short Story”). Her post included memes and screenshots, all related to the most damning image: an email from Hospitality, the events offshoot of the already-problematic UK drum & bass mega brand, Hospital Records, with a lowball booking request. It proposed a 2-hour slot at a Hospitality night in Milton Keynes, a city around 100km away from London, where Sheba Q lives. The distance is important in light of the fee: £125, all inclusive. The email states Hospitality’s conditions plainly: ”Accommodation provided?: No. Travel Provided?: No. Hospitality provided? Yes.” What nightmare version of hospitality underpays a Black female artist, expects her to cover her own travel and/or accommodation costs away from home, and then leaves her to her own devices at midnight, when her set finishes, to figure out how to safely get to where she needs to go?

These folks deserve applause for their financial transparency and vulnerability. But it’s no coincidence that in all three instances these are individuals who, structurally, have the most to lose and least to gain. It’s particularly galling at a moment when profitable businesses in the scene are the most demonstrably greedy for the cultural capital of aligning with queer, PoC, and socially conscious artists and collectives.

In an article titled ‘Neoliberalism in the Music Industries’, researcher Julien Palliere offers a sober assessment of music ecosystems that buries the fantasy of a meritocracy. “That musical commodities can be valued,” he writes, “does not guarantee their remuneration.” That’s true, but it’s worth considering the potential impacts of widespread financial transparency, as a baseline standard. What might shift, aesthetically and culturally, with a clearer understanding of where wealth is being hoarded, hidden or obscured? While we slowly begin to acknowledge that there are too few conversations about the intersection of club culture with class and capital, perhaps the conversation should begin right here.

References:

Palliere, Julien (2021) "Neoliberalism in the Music Industries" in Rock n’ Heavy. Medium.

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JULY 2022: CLAUDE YOUNG IS LAUGHING

In her 1996 book Club Cultures, media scholar Sarah Thornton wrote extensively about a subcultural scene that was still only in its adolescence. “One reason why tapes of DJ mixes can be bought at raves, markets and under the table in dance record shops,” she explains, is that “dance fans desire documents of DJ performance.”

This idea, that a mix is neither traditional recorded music nor experiential live event, but rather a specific document tied to a time and place, rang in my mind last week. In a panel discussion about club culture and capitalism, Bloomfeld and DVS1 spoke about recent podcast mixes they’d individually recorded for well-known platforms, not necessarily because of a deep desire to do so, but rather feeling compelled to do so because they would be published by well-known platforms. In this era of club culture’s middle age, the DJ mix is still a document of taste and interpretation yet it is also regarded almost as an endlessly generatable resource. Mixes are fed like tokens into a slot machine with no bottom, at a rate that outstrips any reasonable metric of demand. They represent a transaction of capital, but one where the labour of the curator-conduit usually goes unpaid. Composers are absent from this equation altogether. Each performance is replaced by something new, weekly, daily, or monthly.

During a recent moment of decision fatigue, I did what I do at least every couple of years: returned to a beloved mix that I’ve heard so many times that I usually couldn’t say for sure when I’m actually listening, or just finding joy in the familiarity of every shift and change. This mix, by Claude Young, was released under the DJ-Kicks series the year after Sarah Thornton’s book; I discovered it perhaps a half decade afterwards. As a young and deeply orthodox house devotee to that point, this mix represented the unsheathing of vital knowledge. Techno had mostly clattered at some distance away from me, with no real appeal or clear entry point. But from his position within the third wave of Detroit techno, and with the limber wrists of a trick turntablist, Claude Young performed what appeared to me, at the time, like an extended magic trick. The mix was a revelation over multiple chapters, disorientingly unpredictable and polyrhythmic, bouncing between multiple copies of the same track, punctuated by bracing backspins.

When I asked myself this time why I keep returning to this mix in particular, there was no romantic answer. It serves a purpose: it is a hard reset in audio form, when I need to take a blowtorch to the cobwebs of fatigue and daily grievances. Every moment of it is endearing and well-worn. Or, so I thought.

As I recently stomped around my apartment listening to the mix for the zillionth time, with headphones on loud, something unexpected stopped me in my tracks. Like Bruce Willis’ purgatorial therapist character in the Sixth Sense, I rewound this 15-second moment, over and over again, completely taken aback by a sound I’d never noticed before. It’s very easy to miss. Around eight minutes in, and buried deep within the minimal static of Torsten Pröfrock’s “2”, you can, faintly but distinctly, hear the captured sound of a muffled conversation, and then one person - I want to think it’s Claude Young himself - warmly laughing.

References:

Thornton, S. (1996) Club cultures: Music, media, and subcultural capital. Wesleyan University Press.

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German translation by Thilo Schneider / Artwork by Johnny Abate

MAY 2022: The pain of denying true pleasure

“Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain, and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do.” (Jeremy Bentham)

The word ‘hedonism’ derives from the ancient Greek word for ‘pleasure’. Our cultural understanding of hedonism tends to fixate on the extremes of these pleasures: intoxicating temptations and Dionysian consumption that deliriously engulfs the senses. This reading of hedonism is undeniably laced into the spaces we inhabit. Whether in club settings that are makeshift or cute or grotty, in trampled-down fields, or in the still, ripe air of the home afterhour, there is an exquisite abandon in our pleasure. There is joy, release. Escape.

And yet. Like many things, hedonism manifests along a spectrum. Egocentric hedonism prioritises uncritical pleasure-seeking; its strong desires are atomised and personalised. That isn’t to say that all individualised hedonism is inherently bad. However, dressing it up in the appearance of a greater, unifying agenda becomes a grotesque feat of mental and spiritual gymnastics, twisting around sharply to whisper lies directly into one's own ear. This hedonism of individual fulfilment is packaged, repackaged again, and served back to us, cold. It’s a reverse game of pass-the-parcel where bloating and distorting the original shape is the goal. We soothe ourselves with these layers of platitudes: “Rave culture is about unity.” “Our goals are utopian.” “Our scene is welcoming to all.”

There are numerous attempts, nowadays, to give form and context to the hedonism we seek. We’re encouraged to be safe, to reject the violence that grazes against us - some of us more frequently than others. To counteract these ugly words and intentions, we are asked for interactions that are earnest and tender. Yet detractors label them as too tricky, joy-sapping and moralising, with their rules and emotionality. At odds with the (alleged) set of beliefs that drew us together in the first place.

So how do we align our estranged and fractured narratives? There is a definition of hedonism that characterises it as “ecstatic, orgiastic… or frenzied, undisciplined.” Yet hedonism may, in the end, be the fuel necessary to finally accelerate our stunted gestures towards rave liberation forwards. It can push us beyond our normative understanding of mere pleasure frenzy, to savour the sharp and complex flavours of many hedonisms: psychological, ethical and altruistic. A radical, expansive hedonism that doesn’t need to be propped up like dead weight against a nostalgia that serves so few. An empathic embodiment that is contingent on softening the planes and sharp edges of personal sovereignty. It is knowing (and believing) that your pain brings me no pleasure. In fact, your pleasure enhances my own. In fact, pleasure isn’t just the inverse of pain, but an act of critical intimacy that heals the wounds of the ego’s motivations.

So let’s sit together once again, and reverse that backwards game. Unwrap the parcel. Acknowledge that the prize at the centre was just sweet-scented vapour. Perceive it as it dissipates, grieve its non-appearance. Then, release yourself. Cue up Claudja Barry’s “Love For the Sake Of Love”, but only the steamy, luxuriant, 7-minute 12” version. Slow dance with indulgence, wink back at its flirtatiousness. Then ask yourself, kindly: “what is really, and truly, at odds with my own pleasure?”

References:

Anderson, T. L. and Kavanaugh, P. R. (2007) A ‘Rave’ Review: Conceptual Interests and Analytical Shifts in Research on Rave Culture

Fraser, A. (2012) The Spaces, Politics, and Cultural Economies of Electronic Dance Music

Moore, A. (2013) Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy - Hedonism

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