Weekend Societies - Electronic Dance Music Festivals and Event-Cultures-Bloomsbury Academic (2017)

Weekend
Societies
Weekend
Societies
Electronic Dance Music Festivals
and Event-Cultures
EDITED BY
GRAHAM ST JOHN
Bloomsbury Academic
An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc
N E W YO R K • LO N D O N • OX F O R D • N E W D E L H I • SY DN EY
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© Graham St John, 2017
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CONTENTS
List of Figures vii
Introduction: Dance Music Festivals and Event-Cultures

Graham St John 1
PART ONE Dance Empires and EDM Culture

Industry 23
1 EDM Pop: A Soft Shell Formation in a New Festival
Economy
Fabian Holt 25
2 Stereosonic and Australian Commercial EDM Festival

Culture
Ed Montano 45
3 Searching for a Cultural Home: Asian American Youth in

the EDM Festival Scene
Judy Park 69
PART TWO Underground Networks and

Transformational Events 91
4 Boutiquing at the Raindance Campout: Relational
Aesthetics as Festival Technology
Bryan Schmidt 93
vi CONTENTS
5 Harm Reduction or Psychedelic Support? Caring for Drug-

Related Crises at Transformational Festivals
Deirdre Ruane 115
6 Dancing Outdoors: DiY Ethics and Democratized Practices

of Well-Being on the UK Alternative Festival Circuit
Alice O’Grady 137
7 Free Parties and Teknivals: Gift-Exchange and

Participation on the Margins of the Market and the State
Anne Petiau (Translation by Luis-Manuel Garcia) 159
PART THREE Cosmopolitan Experiments and

Electroniculture 173
8 Towards a Cosmopolitan Weekend Dance Culture
in Spain: From the Ruta Destroy to the Sónar Festival
Paolo Magaudda 175
9 Being-Scene at MUTEK: Remixing Spaces of Gender

and Ethnicity in Electronic Music Performance
tobias c. van Veen 195
10 Charms War: Dance Camps and Sound Cars at Burning

Man
Graham St John 219
Index 245
LIST OF FIGURES
1.1 DJ Afrojack and SFX CEO Robert Sillerman
at NASDAQ, Times Square, New York City,
9 October 2013. 33
1.2 Tomorrowland main stage 2013. 36
2.1 Stereosonic, Sydney 2012. 47
2.2 Stereosonic, Sydney 2012. 51
4.1 A painter creates visionary art near the dancefloor of a

Raindance sound stage. 98
4.2 Water sculpture with permaculture system created by

Gerasimos Christophoratos. 105
4.3 A piece of visionary art present at Raindance 2013. 110
5.1 The Sacred Fire, Boom 2014. 118
5.2 Constructing the Temple, Burning Man 2014. 120
5.3 The Zendo setup at Burning Man 2014. 125
6.1 Demonstration of blacksmithing at Alchemy Festival,

2014. 143
6.2 Demonstration of woodcarving with chainsaws at

Alchemy Festival, 2014. 143
6.3 Waveform Festival, 2012. 147
6.4 Magikana Festival, Wales. 150

viii LIST OF FIGURES
8.1 Main stage at ‘Sónar by Day’ 2009, when the festival

was held in the CCCB and MACBA spaces within the
barrio El Raval. 187
9.1 Jeff Mills plays percussion on the Roland TR-909,

MUTEK Montréal (2012). 201
9.2 Katherine Kline and Erin Sexton improvise live

electronic noise, MUTEK Montréal (2009). 206
9.3 Mossa plays percussion on amplified fruit, MUTEK

Montréal (2014). 212
10.1 The Ten Principles of Burning Man. 221
10.2 Techno Ghetto, Burning Man, 1996. 227
10.3 The Space Cowboys’ ‘Mog’, Burning Man 2014. 229
10.4 The Dancetronauts, Burning Man 2014. 238

Introduction: Dance Music
Festivals and Event-Cultures
Graham St John
Researchers across the spectrum of social and cultural disciplines have, in

recent times, sought to bring understanding to a growing cultural pattern
where festivals have become integral to tourism and regional cultural
economies and to the performance of identity and lifestyle. While electronic
dance music (or EDM1) cultures are implicated in the ‘festivalisation of
culture’ (Bennett, Taylor and Woodward 2014), they have lent their own
unique sensibility to the pattern over the past two decades, at the crossroads
of diverse local and global influences. When I say unique, I mean that dance
music cultures possess distinct festal roots, in the club, the rave, the party.
Beneath its diverse variations, electronic dance music culture is an event
culture. But to refer to dance music festivalization is to acknowledge the
variegated ways in which the local events and cultures native to dance
music have evolved (and some might even argue, devolved) into larger scale
mediated cultural events and global festivals.
So far as dance cultural studies is concerned, this is relatively fresh terrain,
despite the fact that electronic dance cultural events and their event-cultures
proliferate and diversify rapidly. The local/global socio-cultural complexity
of dance festivals demands conceptual frameworks capable of rendering
1
A note on the use of the term ‘EDM’. While this is conventionally used as a shorthand acronym
for all forms of ‘electronic dance music’ (as, for example, the broad field of scholarship appearing
in Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture), in the last ten years ‘EDM’ has been
progressively co-opted and popularized by a live event industry (e.g. SFX Entertainment,
Insomniac, etc.) in which multiple electronic dance musics are formulated and marketed as
‘EDM’ (Reynolds 2012). Given that the dance music festival is the primary vehicle for this
development, and that festivals are the primary focus of this volume, this introduction uses
the non-acronymical ‘electronic dance music’, or more simply ‘dance music’ or ‘dance music
festival’, to distinguish the broader cultural development from an industry trend that in this
volume Fabian Holt dubs ‘EDM pop’.
2 WEEKEND SOCIETIES
these practices amenable to understanding – frameworks that will inevitably

evolve from sustained ethnographic and multi-methods research, the kind
of research that, for instance, led Chalcraft and Magaudda (2013), by way
of a comparison of Sónar and WOMAD, to coin the phrase ‘festivalscape’,
a concept inspired by Appadurai’s (1990) variety of ‘-scapes’ – ethnoscapes,
mediascapes, technoscapes, financescapes and ideoscapes – each comprising
unique sets of ‘flows’ that intersect with others at the shifting local–global
disjunctures of modernity. All such ‘scapes’ intersect in the festival, a topos
greater than its components.
Festivalscapes are a set of cultural, material and social flows, at both

local and global levels, both concrete and imagined, both deliberate and
unintended, which emerge and are established during a specific festival.
In this sense, festivals can be seen and analysed as terrains where different
cultural, aesthetic and political patterns and values temporarily converge
and clash, constantly creating, stabilizing and redefining the setting of
festival interaction, and in so doing stressing the problems raised by the
multiple articulation of global cultural flows, local life and spatiality
(Chalcraft and Magaudda 2013: 174).
Scholars have given considerable attention to the study of music festivals.

Recent scholarship emphasizes the diversity of cultural productions (see
McKay 2015), with festivals recognisably shaped by various agendas,
organizational styles and local influences (Wynn 2015). If music festivals
offer privileged perspectives on the ‘local globalities’ of late modernity
(Chalcraft and Magaudda 2013), electronic dance music festivalscapes
are unique lenses on the diversity of such intersections. And yet, the
latter are substantively under-researched. While there have been a variety of
approaches to dance cultural industries, including cultural histories of disco
(Lawrence 2003) and transnational house club culture (Rietveld 1998),
and studies of regional (Buckland 2002; Anderson 2009) or ‘hypermobile’
(D’Andrea 2007) scenes, there has been little sustained study of electronic
dance music festivalization,2 including research that could observe the
evolution of a cultural industry through the fates of individual cultural
events.
Electronic dance music culture lies at the crossroads of local event
origins and global industry imperatives. This volume grew out of a themed
issue of Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture in which
several of the chapters were first published. Dancecult was a fitting venue
for the volume’s inception, given the journal’s commitment to publishing
research on local and global cultural developments in electronic dance
2
An exception is work produced by Ed Montano (see Montano 2009, 2011, and this volume).
INTRODUCTION: DANCE MUSIC FESTIVALS AND EVENT-CULTURES 3
music, including festivals. While the international community of researchers

at Dancecult do not conflate EDM (the acronym) with EDM (the festival
industry), this has become an increasingly fraught terrain given the growth
in the popularization of ‘EDM’ as an apparent ‘genre’. Nevertheless, that
journal and this volume recognize the diversity of cultural forms in which
electronic dance music manifests. From massive anarcho-libertarian raves
sprouting around the London orbital at the turn of the 1990s, to dance
empires responsible for cross-genre (‘EDM’), multi-city, transnational
mega-raves, electronic dance music festivals have flourished worldwide
over the last twenty-five years. They have become platforms for a variety of
arts, lifestyles, industries, policies and indeed event-cultures, whether free-
party teknivals proliferating across Europe since the mid-1990s; colossal
attractions like Belgium’s Tomorrowland, a ‘festival world’ enabled by new
forms of mediatization (Holt 2016) and attracting more than 400,000
people over two weekends in July of 2014; ‘transformational festivals’ like
Southern California’s Lightning in a Bottle; or digital arts and new media
showcases like Montréal’s MUTEK and Barcelona’s Sónar Festival, the event
most instrumental ‘in legitimizing electronic music as an artform’ (Chalcraft
and Magaudda 2013: 187).
The proliferation of electronic dance music festivals is an echo of
the profusion of dance cultures and their night and day worlds. While
weekend societies are exemplary event-centred cultures that provide
their memberships with identification and recognition independent from
traditional sources (e.g. ethnicity, faith, class), eventized movements are
diverse in their organization, intention and populations. From ethically
charged events with commitments to local regions and indigenous
communities to subsidiaries of entertainment conglomerates touring multiple
nations annually, dance music festivals are expressions of ‘freedoms’ that are
revolutionary and recreational. Co-created ‘do-ocracies’ inspired by Burning
Man or corporate sponsored bureaucracies in the mould of LA’s Electric
Daisy Carnival, churches of genre or ecumenical free-for-alls, DJ-driven or
fusional by design, offering sustainable solutions or orgies of excess, with
habitués worshipping brand-name DJs or showing support for independent
sound systems, diversity is evident across management styles, mediatization
strategies, performance legacies and modes of participation.
From Detroit’s Movement Electronic Music Festival to Portugal’s Boom
Festival, dance music festivals have become stages for the performance of
transnational meta-cultural aesthetics (e.g. techno, dub, psychedelic) and
their potential synthesis. Characterized by meteoric rises, like Insomnia
Events’ Electric Daisy Carnival (EDC), and tragic demises, like Berlin’s
Love Parade (Nye and Hitzler 2011), these events have become major
cultural and tourism industry hubs. With stakeholders and ticketholders
carrying disparate motives, styles and expectations, they are contested sites.
As cultural flashpoints, dance music festivals continually incite fledgling
4 WEEKEND SOCIETIES
operations under variable missions – reclaiming tradition, maintaining

independence, selling culture, reducing harm, evolving consciousness – all
transpiring at the verges of the dancefloor.
While for the most part this volume addresses the cultures, or event-
cultures, of electronic dance music, it begins with much-needed analyses
of the culture industry of ‘EDM’—the meta-genre birthed by way of the
music festival format. In his chapter, Fabian Holt opens the discussion on
a development that has received scant formal attention, perhaps because
comprehension of the success of these events relies on analytical expertise
in social and visual media as well as genre formation, in addition to event-
ethnography. With attention to Tomorrowland among other festivals, what
Holt calls ‘EDM pop’ is framed as a ‘soft shell genre formation’, a term
adapted from culture industry sociology. Holt recognizes EDM pop as the
product of the evolution of the popular music festival format in which EDM
festivals have evolved into lucrative social media events beyond their physical
platform. Tomorrowland is owned by SFX Entertainment, which, headed by
media mogul Robert F. X. Sillerman, was a seminal force in the contemporary
commodification of electronic dance music, exploited by way of the festival
format, a practice with long roots in country and rock industries. Indeed,
Sillerman had transformed the concert industry in the 1990s by consolidating
regional rock promoters into Live Nation Entertainment. The year 2012
appeared to be the pinnacle of an investment ‘gold rush’ in ‘EDM’. As chief
executive of Live Nation, Michael Rapino, was reported to state at that time,
‘If you’re 15 to 25 years old now, this is your rock “n” roll’. The same New
York Times story reported that DJs like Deadmau5, Tiësto and Afrojack were
earning over $1 million for a festival appearance and up to $10 million for
a Las Vegas nightclub residency (Sisario 2012). The serious risks associated
with scaling up underground dance music appeared to show by 2016, when,
$490 million USD in debt, SFX declared bankruptcy, shares plummeted, and
Sillerman was replaced as CEO (Peoples 2016).
Before this disaster, SFX embarked on a spending rampage buying up
hundreds of dance music event companies. Among those outfits acquired
was the parent company of Australia’s EDM mega-event Stereosonic,
Totem OneLove. In his contribution to this volume, Ed Montano addresses
the implications of this development, arguing that, with an abundance of
international acts, Stereosonic ‘seems to be the culmination of Australian
dance music culture’s drive to the global stage’. With the example of this
national touring festival, Montano’s discussion of developments in Australia
helps shape the inquiry. Does the shift from the intimacy of the nighttime
clubbing scene to massive weekend festivals appearing in replicable formats
with similar lineups and headline acts in events increasingly designed according
to commercial motivations amount to the blanketing of local populations,
culture and place? It would appear that under the machinations of SFX and
other enterprises like Insomniac, this process may be well under way.
Dance event-cultures and festivalization

The history of electronic dance music culture is in large part a story of the
emergence of dance events and the cultures (and cultural industries) that
have sustained them. It is a story of interrelated eventized dance movements
that in many cases have evolved from localized cultural events (e.g. raves)
to global cultural events (international festivals). While the contributions of
Holt and Montano illustrate the corporatized outcomes of EDM
festivalization, this recent narrative of industry massification competes with
other stories in this cultural field. Such stories typically involve the formation
of event-cultures; for example, acid house, rave, techno, psytrance, dub
cultures and their diasporic movements whose populations have the dance
event as their common purpose, a festal enclave beyond which its ‘culture’
may have little prestige, currency or even market value. It is a story that
features different outcomes according to the event-culture in question, with
a narrative that may change in tone depending on whom among the variety
of stakeholders one dialogues with.
Common to the festivalizing process is the story of legitimation. EDM
festivals have been capable of establishing firm and continuing relationships
with governing bodies on the strength of their powerful monopolization
of music and media, resulting in gargantuan mega-events responsible for
massive increases in regional tourism wealth. Offering a case study of a
markedly different albeit successful niche tourism industry event, Paolo
Magaudda discusses the exemplary case of Barcelona’s Sónar, a festival
that began in 1994, evolving into a reputable cosmopolitan event on the
international stage. Magaudda describes how Sónar was established
as a legitimate translocal cultural phenomenon (i.e. staged in multiple
international locations), endowing the city of Barcelona with brand power,
becoming unique in doing so. Sónar’s success depended on distinguishing
itself from those deviant aspects dance music culture associated with nightlife
and illicit consumption practices – the publically mediated panic over which
had caused the repression of ‘weekend cultures’ in various regions, including
that exemplified by Spain’s own under-documented ‘ruta destroy’ movement,
which had its roots in early 1980s Valencia, escalating at the turn of the
1990s, and vanishing by the early 1990s. Offering the first study in English
of this phenomenon, Magaudda’s chapter also addresses ruta, demonstrating
how, twenty years after its demise, protagonists resurrected the event-culture
in the form of various modes of cultural representation. This process of
demise (cultural panic) and resurrection (cultural celebration), where dance
music culture becomes an object of cultural memory is a trajectory repeated
elsewhere in the history of these movements.
Magaudda observes how Sónar negotiates tensions at the heart of dance
music culture, through the creation of separate subcultural/institutional
6 WEEKEND SOCIETIES
sections within its vast programme (broadly, Sónar by day, and Sónar
by night). There is a similar tension preoccupying tobias c. van Veen in
this volume in a retrospective study of MUTEK, Montréal’s influential
electronic music festival. Kicking off in 2000, and becoming the inspiration
for satellite events (e.g. in Chile, Argentina, Mexico, Berlin), MUTEK is
the first North American festival to combine ‘rhythmic electronic music
alongside experimental audiovisual works in listening contexts’. Informed
by his own role as a curator and long-time participation in the event, van
Veen explores the tension between MUTEK’s serious post-rave pretensions
and the ‘communitas’ that blurs the boundary between performer and
spectator typical of the art festival. In a study of the arts and politics of
what he calls ‘being scene’, and the artifice of DJing, van Veen explores
the implications of the imperative of cultural institutionalization in ‘live’
music performance. Since MUTEK pursues cultural legitimacy by way of
Western musical traditions exemplified, as the chapter suggests, by electro-
acoustic and acousmatic music with its attendant privileging of white male
performers, it distances itself from dance music and its DJ performance
practice. This curatorial agenda is imputed to not only exclude female
performers, but the performance mode (i.e. turntablism) adopted
predominantly by Afrodiasporic artists.
Electronic music has become integral to the ways cities seek to build
reputations as desirable destinations in the ‘experience economy’ possessing
distinct profiles within regional and global ‘cultural tourism’ networks (see
Rapp 2009). Such can be observed in the activities of electronic arts and
music festivals like CTM (formerly Club Transmediale), a festival integral to
the New Berlin, and an event that, as Geoff Stahl (2014) observes, requires
the right balance of cultural and social capital in order to sustain itself. Like
MUTEK, CTM has been intimately connected with film festivals and the
visual arts (especially the digital arts festival transmediale) since its inception
in 2002. While CTM has its origins in late 1990s underground club culture
located primarily around the former East Berlin districts of Prenzlauer Berg
and Mitte, not unlike Sónar and MUTEK, organizers must respond to the
demands of becoming a sustainable professional event – for example, with
strategic partnerships, regional and international networks, the imperatives
of funding regimes, etc. – while, maintaining, again according to Stahl, a
‘margin of unpredictability’ and a connection to the event’s roots.
Diverse event-centred dance movements have emerged in the history of
electronic dance music. Take for example, the free-party tekno sound system
culture that flourished in France, Italy and elsewhere in Europe (and indeed
outside Europe) from the mid-1990s, which was inspired by Spiral Tribe
and other sound systems formed from collaborations between travellers and
ravers, a development that saw the formation of teknivals (St John 2009:
ch. 2). Or alternatively, consider psyculture, which emerged in the wake of
Goatrance and which caused the birth of Portugal’s Boom Festival among
a now crowded calendar of psychedelic trance festivals in Europe and

worldwide (Rom and Querner 2011; St John 2014a). Despite the differences
between these festal cultures, the variations in ethics, technics and sensory
aesthetics, they share utopian sensibilities shaped by responses to lifeworld
circumstances, not least of all state regulation and corporatization of dance
music culture, and indeed the mainstreaming of EDM. Across these event-
centred movements we find fiercely independent music and event-industries
reliant on the re/production of the festival, a space of gift-exchange and
alternative commercial economies that are at their most consistent in ‘free’
(or by donation) events.
As Anne Petiau states in her contribution to this volume (translated
by Luis Manuel-Garcia from the French original), at teknivals, ‘one can
recognize the means by which individuals constantly re-establish social ties
relevant to a system of gift-exchange, whether outside the systems of market
and state or in their interstices’. Petiau explores the status of the French
teknival as gift, a reciprocal logic distributed throughout the worldwide
teknival movement where event-goers are encouraged to contribute to and
effectively co-create events. The ethos of participation or ‘no spectators’ can
also be found at the root of psychedelic trance events in Goa, and in every
region of its emergence worldwide. But it is an ethos that is also challenged
in each region, as small-scale events burgeon into festivals, as markets grow
and fan-bases develop, as DJ cultures become celebrity cultures, as cottage
industries become cultural industries.
Original scenes are challenged as artists become inflated into headphone-
wearing icons occupying stages that grow higher and more elaborate,
and where the gulf between the elevated artist and a vast sea of dancers –
including those watching live-feeds at locations inside the venue or on
the other side of the planet – grows wider. Maintaining an original PLUR
ethos becomes a dubitable motivation for massive up-scaled festivals
like Insomniac’s Electric Daisy Carnival. If EDC, mounted in numerous
locations annually across the United States and abroad, amounts to a
‘religious experience’ for participants – as observed by DJ Tiësto in Under
the Electric Sky (Cutforth and Lipsitz 2014), the documentary film for the
2013 Las Vegas EDC – one could speculate on the apparatus responsible
for eliciting transcendence on a scale that attracted 350,000 people to the
event at the Las Vegas Motor Speedway that year. In the film, one event
designer offers the insight that ‘people are coming here to be inspired. If
you go back to the purpose of cathedrals and what people were going for,
it was to feel small and spiritually alive’. Making people feel small amid the
spectacle is lucrative for Insomniac founder Pasquale Rotella who, at one
point in the film, casts a commanding gaze across the mega-rave aboard a
VIP float. Strategic event-aggrandizement of this nature appears to have
become indispensable to festival marketing since the Tomorrowland 2011
aftermovie (Tomorrowland 2011), which converts the cultural event into a
8 WEEKEND SOCIETIES
cinematic experience. As a mediated effort to capture the immediacy of an

event, could the cinematic experience augment an event-culture, in this case
that which is enlivened by the sounds of Progressive House? Such triggers an
avalanche of questions concerning the role of new mediatization practices
in EDM cultural events, notably the deregulation of broadcasting that has
permitted event-organizations to distribute video by way of YouTube and
social media. What might cultural events and beyond that, event-cultures,
look like in these ‘new configurations of time, space and capital’ (Holt
2016)? What are the dimensions of the ‘event’ in a world of infinitely
remediated live-feeds, and where aftermovies are ‘digital folkloric texts
that everyone shares’ (Holt 2016). And ‘is it possible to base a culture’, as
Simon Reynolds asked nearly two decades ago, ‘around sensations rather
than truths, fascination rather than meaning, jouissance rather than plaisir?’
(1997: 109). For event marketing strategists, the answer is probably ‘yes’, if
by ‘culture’ one means a brand to which event-goers are loyal.
To observe the festivalization of dance culture is in some ways to observe
the career of the liminal experience that has been emically recognized as
the vibe – the socio-sonic experiential currency valued across dance scenes.
Many researchers have recognized that the sociality of the much-vaunted vibe
approximates the undifferentiated sensation of ‘spontaneous communitas’
(Turner 1969). For participants, this is a social juncture in which one
participates wholly, and to which one is not a spectator. In the communitas
of dance music events – the discommunitas – such participation ultimately
involves the dissolution of subjectivity in which one becomes other to one’s
self. In all the regions of this development, event-managers typically recall
that ur-moment when ‘it all made sense’, that protean transformative juncture
that afforded the inspiration to mount events that attempt to recreate the
primal rave, augmented by sensory technologies and event design. Among
the chief aspects of communitas is its capacity to unify strangers, each of
whom are wholly attending, including those with disparate backgrounds,
aesthetics, genders, sexualities and ethnicities. In the worldwide localities,
or global localities, of its emergence – usually within metropolitan centres,
but also in expatriate and experimental enclaves such as Goa in the late
1980s, Black Rock City (or Burning Man, see Jones 2011; St John 2014b), or
perhaps Germany’s Fusion Festival – the non-local community of the dance
music festival is stamped with cosmopolitan relationships. While art festivals
are known to explicitly privilege the encounter, exchange and dialogue with
the Other (Chalcraft, Delanty and Sassatelli 2014), the dance music festival
is primarily dedicated to optimizing the conditions for the othering of the
self. There have been few attempts to critically address such relationships
within dance music cultural events and their event-cultures, which have
proclaimed utopic sensibilities inscribed, for example, in the mythos of
PLUR (Peace, Love, Unity, Respect), or the psychedelic dissolution of self-
other boundaries. An exception is Judy Soojin Park, whose chapter addresses
racial stereotyping within scenes that have typically promoted egalitarianism.

Park’s study of Insomniac Events in Southern California demonstrates how
Asian American participants leverage ‘belonging’ in a middle-class white-
dominated scene by way of the imagined other of ‘urban hip-hop blackness’.
By focusing on the negotiations of race and class by nonwhite participants’
in EDM festival scenes, and through a study of intra-scene tensions that
present challenges to the egalitarian ideology of ‘PLUR’, Park’s work is
representative of a neglected research direction within dance cultural studies.
Dance festivals hold varying commitments to the varieties of
cosmopolitanism identified by Chalcraft, Delanty and Sassatelli (2014:
111) – including the relativization of one’s own identity, positive recognition
of the other, mutual evaluation of cultures and a shared normative
culture, which involves self-other relations that are ‘mediated through
an orientation towards world consciousness’. With regard to the latter,
Portugal’s Boom Festival commands attention as a vehicle for ‘planetary
consciousness’, a hallmark expression in the psycultural diaspora, as
evident, for example, in total solar eclipse festivals (St John 2013). While
these festivals are characterized by a ‘global’ consciousness, as reflected in
cultural programming, ecological sustainability programs, artist nationalities
and attendance by international ‘travellers’, they are nevertheless mounted
within national borders where host cultures shape event management,
promotion, programming and participant experience. But while host nations
curate events, there is ambivalence expressed within psyculture towards
national identity. On the one hand, one’s nationality is valued. In Alchemy
of Spirit, the documentary produced on Boom 2012 (DROID i.d. 2013),
the many participants vox-popped at the film’s beginning are asked to state
their country of origin. Many nations are identified, and Boom revels in
the multitude of national passport-holders represented at the event. For
example, the front page of the Boom 2014 newspaper The Dharma Dragon
celebrated the presence of ticket-holders from a record 152 nations at that
event. National identity is performed on site, including by way of national
flag displays by individual dancers. And yet, such displays are not without
controversy. In 2014, also by way of The Dharma Dragon, Boom issued an
edict to the affect that there should be no displays of national flags inside
the main dancefloor: the Dance Temple. It is an observation consistent with
that venue’s stature as a sacred site, a global destination for transcendence-
seeking pilgrims, a ‘mothership’ in which one becomes temporarily abducted
from standard identifiers (like nationality).
Transformational festivals
Several chapters in this volume address the phenomenon of ‘transformational
festivals’. I have long been cognisant that festivals, especially those across
10 WEEKEND SOCIETIES
the alternative spectrum of events, are transformational. In fact, this is

among my chief motivations for researching such events, that they permit
entrants to become liminars (literally: threshold dwellers) while occupying
the demarcated time-space framework of the event. As festal citizens,
participants are afforded passage into a transitional world possessing liminal
conditions and carnivalesque logics (or illogics) to which inhabitants are
compelled to surrender. The mood prevailing is, as Victor Turner knew,
not inconsistent with a rite of passage, a structured ritual that possesses
the power to transform an individual’s status, identity and life; only, the
liminality of the modern festival holds heterogenous, elective and hyper-
mediated characteristics. Raves and other dance events have embraced the
transitional logic of the rite of passage, with ravers liminars par excellence.
Whether revelatory practitioner accounts, or scholarly treatises, or those
combining these approaches, electronic dance music culture literature offers
testimony to the power of rave, techno, house, psytrance, etc., to transform
participants, with experients typically claiming that events have changed
lives, occasioning the formation of associations, causing re-evaluations of
lifestyle, consumer and relationship patterns and the fashioning of more and
more raves. In those events where the economic and aesthetic contribution
of participants is encouraged, the cultures endogenous to these events are
stamped with the imprimatur of transformative potentiality.
Today, an event model appears to have harnessed and bottled this logic.
‘Transformational festivals’, in which electronic music often predominates
(although not exclusively), like Lightning in a Bottle (California), Symbiosis
(Nevada), Lucidity (Southern California), The Oracle Gatherings (Seattle),
Beloved (Oregon), Shambhala (British Columbia), Sunrise Celebration
(United Kingdom), Envision (Costa Rica), Boom (Portugal),3 among many
others, are downstream from the confluence of various countercultural
event models, including West Coast North American festival culture,
notably Burning Man; UK Free Festivals in the Traveller tradition; and
Goa Trance/psytrance and psychedelic electronica. We could trace several
interwoven movements influencing these event models: progressive
consciousness evolutionary agendas that have typically been associated
with the New Age movement; sensory technologies and their purposeful
– ‘shamanic’ or ‘gnostic’ – application, as documented, for instance, in
the film Electronic Awakening (Johner 2012); healing arts and the human
potential movement; egalitarianism, civic engagement and direct democracy
(Turner 2014); the back to the land movement, sustainability practices
3
While there are proposed to be ninety ‘transformational festivals’, there is debate and
disagreement about which events meet Jeet-Kei Leung’s criteria set out at: http://thebloomseries
.com/guidelines-for-inclusion-transformational-festivals-map (accessed 13 May 2015).
and permaculture; the visionary arts movement and entheogens; and the
embracing and appropriation of indigeneity (ritual and symbolism).
Shedding light on transformational festivals, Bryan Schmidt in his
contribution to this volume, states that these events include:
an ecstatic core ritual provided through electronic dance music;

visionary art, performance, art installations and live art; a workshop
curriculum covering a spectrum of New Paradigm subjects; the creation
and honoring of sacred space; ceremony and ritual; a social economy of
artisans and vendors (or, alternative gift economy); a natural, outdoor
setting to honor the Earth; and a multiple (typically 3–7) day duration.
These are the paraphrased observations of Jeet-Kei Leung, a documentary

film-maker from Vancouver who popularized (and capitalized) the phrase
‘Transformational Festival’ in a 2010 TEDx talk, subsequently producing
a documentary webseries The Bloom (Leung and Chan 2014) and more
recently using his mailing list to showcase ‘The Bloom Collection’, an
initiative promoting ‘festival inspired apparel and goods’.
These events, then, are programmatically transformational. That is,
we can identify within their precincts the interwoven agendas of personal
growth and global consciousness that are a legacy of the transpersonal
counterculture. Reliant on a transformational architectonic, that these
event-industries are commercial operations catering for a select middle-class
and typically white event-going market is inscribed in the idea of the
‘boutique’ festival, a term sometimes used, as with Schmidt, interchangeably
with ‘transformational festival’. ‘Boutique festivals’, which have evolved
rapidly in the United Kingdom in the last decade, involve substantial
programming diversity, in which electronic dance music can be a minor
element, although typically substantive, as in the BoomTown Fair. These
are participatory arts festivals, involving ‘ethical living’, possessing no
commercial sponsorship, offering diverse dance music genres and lifestyle
workshops and often ‘upmarket amenities’ (including glamour camping, or
‘glamping’, in yurts, podpads and tipis). Within an intensely competitive
festival market, event survival and growth relies on events becoming
strategically distinguished from those that do not offer countercultural
authentica in their experiential design. Critical to this festival-based
authenticity is the degree to which events are removed from those where the
‘main stage’ and lineups predominate proceedings (and promotions), and
where festivalgoers are empowered to be co-creators in event production,
a collaboration that takes diverse forms: from programming input, to
costuming and theatrical performance, to dancing.
By contrast to the sponsored hypermediated event dominated by a
mainfloor mentality, the boutique festival is presented as ‘the informed
consumer’s choice; one who appreciates, and has the means to adhere to, a
green and ethical lifestyle as part of leading a sustainable and responsible

existence’ (Johansson and Toraldo 2015: 9). But while possessing such
progressive pretentions, according to these authors the ‘separation from the
mainstream’ implicit to the ‘boutique experience’ is an illusory performance.
The ‘experience design’ of these weekend societies apparently only provides
the opportunity for ‘temporary countercultural identity performances’
(Johansson and Toraldo 2015: 11). If such is the case, boutique festivals may
then be considered a form of episodic rebellion, a favourite of ‘counterculture’
and ‘subculture’ critics who have attended to festal dissidence as a temporary,
youthful affectation and a form of ineffectual resistance performed by the
privileged. When Hakim Bey’s much vaunted ‘Temporary Autonomous
Zone’ (1991) was denounced as a socially innocuous ‘lifestyle anarchism’
(Bookchin 1995), we recognize one variation of this critique. More
generally, the pursuit of ‘autonomy’, ‘freedom’ and ‘authenticity’ integral to
ticketed (i.e. commercialized) festival culture, boutique or otherwise, might
provide evidence of ‘the new spirit of capitalism’ documented by Boltanski
and Chiapello (2005), who in their analysis of post-1960s cultural activism
demonstrated how capitalism gained legitimacy through licensing artistic
creativity over sustained social critique.
While the idealization of consumer participation is integral to boutique
festivals, whether ‘co-creativity’ is an expression of the creative agency
of individuals or ‘exploitation in the form of free labour through the
expropriation of knowledge, creativity and communication’ (Johansson
and Toraldo 2015: 4), is open to interpretation. We are not far removed,
it seems, from what marketing and consumption researchers refer to as
the ‘co-creation of value’ in the fashioning of brands (Pongsakornrungsilp
and Schroeder 2011). The enterprising consumer may be the ideal event-
goer within this type of event that embraces a philosophy of participation
consistent with the mythos of the autonomous individual whose exercise of
choice paves the way to prosperity, and/or democracy. Strategies by which
event organizations mobilize value adding among event-goers who actively
contribute to a marketable brand betokens a festivalized manifestation of
‘prosumer capitalism’ (Ritzer 2015). Prosumers are actors who produce
and consume, a simultaneity recognizably integral to consumer tribalism
(see Cova, Kozinets and Shankar 2007). Whether events offer micro-
models of neoliberalism (or democracy), the encouragement of participant
agency straddling the consumer/producer divide appears to be the hallmark
strategy of the transformational festival, events that routinely cite the ethos
of Burning Man, the annual Nevada event also known as Black Rock City,
as inspirational. While, according to Chen (2012), the ‘inclusive community
logic’ of Burning Man transforms participants into prosumerists, the practice
as it transpires within the unique parameters of a self-organizing event
demonstrates that it can be harnessed to ‘prefigurative’ and thus genuinely
transformative ends (Chen 2015: 9).
Chief among the reasons why Burning Man has been such a successful
transformative event-culture is that is has evolved a set of working
principles that provide ethical guidance for its participants. Observance of
the event’s Ten Principles has been instrumental in the practice by which
the event distinguishes itself from other events, including dance music
festivals and, specifically, EDM festivals. This strategy has been important
to Burning Man given the increasing prevalence of electronic dance music
in the form of theme camps and sound art vehicles at the event. As my
own contribution to this volume demonstrates, this prevalence has been
the cause of considerable controversy at Burning Man, prompting a series
of policies and compromises, enabling the continuing presence of the dance
music aesthetic while at the same time battling to retain a distinct identity.
An ethical approach to event production, involving principles like
‘communal effort’ and ‘leave no trace’ as well as ‘radical self-expression’ (as
seen at Burning Man) has motivated immersive art festivals worldwide, with
varying degrees of success. Turning to Bourriaud’s ‘relational aesthetics’ to
expose in exuberant ethnographic detail the relational and open-ended
social artifice of the Californian Raindance Campout, Schmidt also begins
unpacking some of the internal conflicts native to the operation of such
events, including the privileged status of participants and the fraught terrain
of cultural appropriation. If recent noise on blogs, social media and event-
forums are any measure, offensive consumer ‘borrowing’ practices at dance
and other music festivals has attracted increasing criticism. In Canada, for
example, controversy over the widespread adoption of feathered headdresses
at festivals sparked outrage among First Nations peoples, fueling debate
within festival communities, which, like British Columbia’s Bass Coast
Festival, banned ‘feathered war bonnets’ in 2014 (Dart 2014). This reaction
to soft colonialism among eventgoers and organizers triggered an avalanche
of popular commentary, including prominent articles in venues as diverse as
the Guardian (Lynskey 2014) and VICE (Pacholik 2015).
That festivals are dynamic experimental sites where the shaping influence
of conflicting discourse, policies and behaviour are negotiated in-situ, is a
subject addressed by Deirdre Ruane in her chapter in this edition. Ruane’s
multi-sited ethnography of voluntary care-provision organizations at Boom,
Burning Man and Secret Garden Party illustrates how these events are
dynamic proving grounds for competing paradigms of drugs, drug users and
‘the self’. Based on evidence presented in Ruane’s study, the transformational
capacity of such events relies upon deference towards the experimental and
therapeutic uses of psychedelic substances prevailing over a medicalization
approach as inscribed in the ‘harm reduction’ model where ‘losing control’
of one’s self (integral to individual growth within transformational/
transpersonal models) is perceived as an impairment. Given the illicit status
of most psychedelics, and variations in national regulatory regimes, support
organizations must negotiate a complicated path. Multi-day dance music
festivals like Boom and Secret Garden Party, where participants establish
comfortable private camping spaces removed from the public domain of
the central festival space and its dancefloors, provide event-goers with
opportunities for experimental intimacies and knowledge sharing often
unfeasible within clubbing environments, or at events in which participants
must typically vacate the festival-grounds daily for their accommodation
in local hotels. So far as drug consumption is concerned, the porous
domestic character of the camping space vis-à-vis the dancefloor provides
an optimal circumstance for sharing experiential knowledge with friends
and neighbours, for communicating norms, for exchange and use, and for
enabling informal harm minimization practices (i.e. friends ‘keeping an eye
on’ each other) (see St John 2012: 174; Dilkes-Frayne 2015).
While Burning Man has inspired UK festivals like Secret Garden Party
and BoomTown Fair, such events appear to cherrypick from the principles
of Black Rock City, effectively ‘remodelling the “No Spectators” ethos to
fit within their own economic framework’ (Robinson 2015: 173). Still, this
should be kept in perspective. While these events are not prestigious ‘free-
party’ universes obligating forms of gift-exchange and event co-production
(as in the logic of the teknival), they do not, at the same time, offer ‘Electric
Sky Package’ tickets (at $5,000) with access to private front-row tables with
prime stage views on the ‘VIP Cabana Deck’, as sold by Insomniac Events for
EDC New York 2015. While the capitalist cultural logic behind this strategy
appears to be about as removed from ‘free’, ‘inclusive’ and ‘authentic’
dispositions as seems possible, resistance to such developments continues
to prompt alternatives within the dance music culture industry. Indeed, the
embrace of participative arts and popular immersive theatricality offers a face-
palm to the star/audience, producer/consumer divisions magnified beyond
measure at EDC. With that said, as Under the Electric Sky demonstrates,
ravers remain perennial participants by way of the shared dance ekstasis –
eternalized further through hyper-social mediations of ‘eternity’ enabled by
Facebook and YouTube. And yet, it will be critical longitudinal studies of
dance and electronic arts festivalscapes and their cultural industries that
will determine more precisely what it is that event-goers are participating
in. Prying open the motivations, imperatives and strategies of transnational
dance entertainment empires, such studies will doubtlessly uncover a
diversity of experimental co/production practices. Practices like that found
at the S.U.N. Summer Gathering in Hungary whose ticketing strategy is
an innovation in the democratization of festival space. For its third annual
event, S.U.N. implemented a strategy where ticketholders were provided the
opportunity to shape the direction and content of the festival as ‘members’
with rights to vote for major acts and land development projects.4
4
http://solarunitednatives.org (accessed 15 May 2015).
Investigations of social media enabled prosumerism among festival goers

will further advance our understanding of ‘participation’ in EDM events,
especially as that involvement is undertaken online beyond the gates and the
duration of the festival. Music festival researchers have provided insights on
the way Web 2.0 digital technologies enable user-generated experience and
interaction extending the festival experience (Morey et al. 2014; Cormany
2015). But while internet, digital and communication technologies have
enabled participation and ‘user-generated’ involvement all year round, and
such technologies have grown integral to music scenes (Bennett and Peterson
2004), scene involvement has little meaning without real-time engagement
inside the precincts of the event, an engagement that involves one’s mobility
and travel to the event.
Among the key recurring features of these recurrent events is that they
are visited by participants who often travel significant distances (regionally
and internationally). Travel to and altered experiences within rural spaces
are among the features of these events appealing to their populace, typically
urban-dwelling participants temporarily vacating. The affective dimensions
of festive rurality are among the chief characteristics of alternative dance
music festivals in the United Kingdom explored by Alice O’Grady in
her chapter in this volume. While holding kinship with transformational
festivals, these events are said to possess distinct roots in the UK free party
movement arising from the convergence of Travellers and DiY sound
systems. O’Grady is concerned with how these events, which also borrow
from traditions like ‘garden parties, English fetes, camping trips, wilderness
adventures’, prioritize the rural idyll and foster authenticity by way of
temporary relocation into the countryside. While it is unstated in O’Grady’s
analysis, I suspect that part of the appeal of these events, their capacity
for enhancing ‘well-being’, is that they are not just experimental spaces but
familiar spaces of experimentation.
Although relying on a gestalt of familiarity, festivals rarely survive
without innovation, which in countries with cluttered events calendars like
the United Kingdom, the United States, Germany and Australia, requires
strategic efforts to gain the favour of, and build support from, the event-
going public. Like other cultural goods and services, the value of the festival
emerges not only in its consumption, but in ‘the anticipation of a desired
experience’ (Johansson and Toraldo 2015: 5). And perhaps nothing builds
excitement more than the promise of surprise (i.e. that which is alternative
to what is available elsewhere). But while novelty is implicit to the event
design of dance music festivals, a circumstance ensuring event-management
will continue to innovate, events also possess a drawing power that relies on
their ability to return event-goers to a familiar place. We might understand
this by way of the highly anticipated ‘little death’ of the ecstatic dance state,
the entranced condition, in which the experient is permitted to go out of their
mind in the company of others, friends and strangers alike, a circumstance
augmented through intention and experience design. The popular desire for
this condition might be stated to be the desire to be without desire, even
however fleetingly. But an understanding of the ‘little death’ of the festival
cannot arrive by way of discursive analyses. Building anticipation for
novelty is critical within the dance music culture industry, where mediators,
none less than DJ/producers and label promoters (some of whom operate
their own festivals or manage event sound-stages), play an important role
in fashioning innovative style, genre iterations, tempo changes, typically
formulated through the fusion of existing aesthetic elements, by which an
original experience is promised. At the same time, the quest for originality in
the laboratory of dance is countermanded by the desire for the familiar, the
return to origins. This festal tension echoes the logic of Csikszentmihalyi’s
(1990) ‘flow’ state. Here, an experience is characterized as ‘flowing’ where
the artifice experienced (i.e. sport, music) is novel, and yet not too novel.
The tension is especially evident in scenes that display remarkable resilience,
like psytrance (see O'Grady 2015), whose participants will return time and
again to a ‘vibe’ that is furnished by aesthetic conventions that are both
timeless (e.g. the 16th note) and challenging (e.g. new styles like ‘hitech’).
Across dance music scenes, the ‘vibe’ represents a curious balancing act
of novelty and familiarity, innovation and authenticity, change and stasis,
the tensions between which appears to illuminate that experience most
endearing to event natives – the familiar otherness of ekstasis. This logic is
recognized by Thomas Turino who offers insight on the role of challenges
in the optimizing of the musical experience sought by those who will return
time and again to re-enter the flow.
These are states associated with activities that must include the proper
balance between inherent challenges and the skill level of the actor. If
the challenges are too low, the activity becomes boring and the mind
wanders; if the challenges are too high, the activity leads to frustration
and the actor cannot engage fully. When the balance is just right, it
enhances concentration and that sense of being at one with the activity
and perhaps the other people involved (Turino 2008: 4).
In electronic dance music scenes, music producers, event organizers and

dancefloor occupants attempt to maintain this harmony, the balancing of
which in recurrent and reversioned events offer insight on the nature of
‘progressive’ sensibilities (for psytrance, see St John 2012: 214–15). While
this familiar difference empowers participants to enter experimental and
transformative states of selfhood, finding the tension-line amid shifting
aesthetics grows increasingly difficult as dance music cultural events
expand to host disparate event-tribes inside their sprawling precincts, such
as might be found at Germany’s Fusion Festival. As events grow in scale
to accommodate more music styles, performance arts and other options
across vast sites, some of them visited by a hundred thousand for a night,
others camped in by a few hundred over a week, their liminal domains grow
complex. If originary cultural events represent an arguably simplistic case
of liminality, larger scale events are hyperliminal contexts, which in the case
of Boom, for example, illustrates the propensity for energy sustainability
and expenditure sought in equal measure by convergent populations (St
John 2014c). Other events falling under the transformational rubric tend to
offer multiple means for transition by permitting event publics the ability
to perform variable identities that emerge on a status spectrum between
consumer (the entertained) and producer (the artist), the complex liminal
conditions of which warrants further consideration in the emergent field
of dance music festival studies.
This returns me to the logic of the transformational festival, and not to
mention many other events consciously investing in a transformational logic.
Such events rely upon the development of cultural industries dedicated to
augmenting the conditions of participant liminality through the optimizing
of event experience design, sensory technologies and prosumer arts. This
event-liminalization raises questions about the supposed efficacy of these
recurrent events, inquiries that will benefit from sustained and longitudinal
studies of festivals. One might inquire, for example, as to whether these
events facilitate transformations in personal, social and cultural conditions
according to the passage rite model in which these festivals typically invest,
or are they more akin to transitional worlds, parallel cultural universes and
liminal mini-states to which event-goers and raving liminars repeatedly
return? Does event attendance afford passage and recognition outside of
the event, or does event experience, relationships and prestige hold currency
only within the eventized culture itself? These are questions that it is hoped
this volume will encourage future researchers to address.
Weekend Societies organizes the chapters introduced above into three
parts, each addressing identifiable themes in the field of electronic dance
music festivals and event-cultures. In part one, Dance Empires and
EDM Culture Industry, Holt, Montano and Park address the origins
and implications of the EDM festival empires that currently dominate
the attention economy of global dance music. In part two, Underground
Networks and Transformational Events, Schmidt, Ruane, O’Grady and
Petiau offer ethnographic insights on the aesthetics, economies and lifestyles
of underground festivals – from boutique festival to teknival – in the United
States, Portugal, the United Kingdom and France. Finally, in part three,
Cosmopolitan Experiments and Electroniculture, Magaudda, van Veen and
St John provide entries on the challenges faced by electronic music scenes
in unique events on the world stage. Their contributions illustrate how
increasingly popular sonicities – in Spain (Sónar), Montréal (MUTEK) and
Black Rock City (Burning Man) – have evolved distinct festival identities
and event-cultures. The contributions to this volume leave considerable
room for future investigations of electronic dance festival events and event-
cultures, especially those proliferating in non-English language countries
and in the global South, regions largely neglected here. It is hoped that
these current entries on this nascent field of festivalization will fuel the
conversation.
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(accessed 25 July 2016).
Turner, Victor. 1969. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. Chicago:
Aldine.
Wynn, Jonathan R. 2015. Music/City: American Festivals and Placemaking in
Austin, Nashville, and Newport. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Filmography
Cutforth, Dan and Jane Lipsitz. 2014. Under the Electric Sky. DVD. Universal.
DROID i.d. 2013. The Alchemy of Spirit. Part 1. Lisbon, Portugal: Boom Team.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTrsenzgJCQ (accessed 14 May 2015).
Johner, Andrew. 2012. Electronic Awakening. DVD. North Atlantic.
Leung, Jeet Kei. 2010. ‘Transformational Festivals’. TEDx Vancouver. http://
tedxtalks.ted.com/video/TEDxVancouver-Jeet-Kei-Leung-Tr (accessed
15 May 2015).
Leung, Jeet Kei and Akira Chan. 2014. The Bloom Series. Elevate Films, Keyframe
Entertainment, Muti Music & Grounded TV. http://thebloomseries.com.
Tomorrowland 2011. Official aftermovie. https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=M7CdTAiaLes (accessed 14 May 2015).
PART ONE
Dance Empires
and EDM Culture
Industry
CHAPTER ONE
EDM Pop: A Soft Shell

Formation in a New Festival
Economy
Fabian Holt
Upon a hill across a blue lake

That’s where I had my first heartbreak
I still remember how it all changed
‘Don’t You Worry Child’, Swedish House Mafia (2012)
Since the late 2000s, a form of electronic dance music consisting mainly of
commercial house music and contemporary top 40 pop music has enjoyed
mass popularity around the globe. The music is often identified as ‘EDM’ in
popular media without being distinguished from other forms of electronic
dance music below the mass media surface. This chapter identifies the
new formation as EDM pop and situates it within broader evolutions in
the popular music festival landscape. EDM pop has been covered by EDM
magazines but also by rock and pop music magazines such as Pitchfork and
Spin, and by the trade magazine Billboard. The trajectory of EDM into pop
culture and into the corporate music industry reflected in this journalism
has been subject to little research. While scholars have studied the growing
industrialization of EDM in local contexts (Montano 2009, 2011; Stahl
2014), a broader conceptual framing of EDM pop and its festivalscape has
not yet appeared in print.
The aim of this chapter is to offer a broad analytical framing of EDM
pop in terms of genre and industry. I argue that EDM pop is involved in
mass culture and corporate industry formations beyond the conventional

genre networks of EDM and that similar situations have occurred several
times before in the history of popular music. EDM pop can be interpreted
as an example of a soft shell genre formation, a term I adopt from
culture industry sociology to map the dynamics of popularization and
corporatization.
A crucial point in the chapter argument is that, following the soft shell
theory, the evolution of EDM pop festivals can not only be interpreted as a
formation within the genre but also within the broader popular music and
popular culture landscape. By contrast to earlier soft shell developments
in popular music history such as the Nashville Sound in country music,
fusion in jazz, ‘tropical’ in salsa, or the ‘global pop’ trajectories of diverse
local traditions, EDM pop is based in a live event economy. Professionally
produced cultural events play a key role in the contemporary cultural
economy of regions and cities, in the music business, in corporate
sponsorship and in place marketing.
The chapter analysis therefore situates EDM pop more specifically within
the new economy of popular music festivals. I argue that this economy
involves three core evolutions: (1) The evolution of the popular music
festival as format for the music business in the 1990s, (2) the evolution
of popular music festivals as generic events to mainstream society and
business1 in the 2000s and (3) the evolution of popular music festivals as
social media events in the 2010s. These evolutions help explain fundamental
aspects of EDM pop festivals and can inform more detailed musicological
and ethnographic studies in the future.
The chapter is based on qualitative research on EDM pop festivals, with
Tomorrowland in Belgium as the main example. I conducted field research
at Tomorrowland in 2012 and 2013, interviewed the promoter ID&T, and
researched the evolution in production, style and business of Tomorrowland
marketing videos and livecasts. Complementary research on Creamfields,
Electric Daisy Carnival, Sunburn and Ultra Music was conducted to explore
general trends in the design and business of this festivalscape.
Conceptual approach: Industry sociology

of mass culture
The scholarly literature on EDM can roughly be interpreted as a discourse
for studying the underground formations that for decades formed the core
1
This chapter refers to mainstream society and business according to terminology in the
sociology of modernity (Slater 1998, 2011).
EDM POP: A SOFT SHELL FORMATION IN A NEW FESTIVAL ECONOMY 27
base of the genre. The same can be said of the literature on popular music
festivals, which has concentrated on countercultural festivals and which has
not yet framed an agenda for their evolution into consumer culture festivals.
These literatures have explored core aspects of culture and community
and their capacity to constitute alternative realities in the individual
festival sphere and in social movement contexts (Cantwell 1993; Giorgi,
Sassatelli and Delanty 2011). Electronic music scholarship has paid special
attention to intimacy, trance, ritual and utopia (D’Andrea 2007; St John
2009). The cultural landscape has changed considerably since the 1990s
when festivals increasingly turned to mass popular music and evolved into
industry-based events, awaiting analytical framing in the respective fields of
scholarship.
This chapter marks a departure from the existing literatures by
researching the mass culture side of festival culture and of EDM,
framing it explicitly as mass culture entertainment. EDM pop festivals
can fundamentally be conceived as consumer culture environments of live
entertainment and have much in common with conventional mass culture
forms. A general aspect is the prevalence of generic models (Holt 2007: 2)
appearing in the form of hit songs, theme park designs and brand culture.
Another typical aspect is the psychological simplicity and emphasis on
light emotions in the crowds and in the many songs about juvenile love
and happiness such as ‘Don’t You Worry Child’ quoted earlier. Like
1970s arena rock, for instance, EDM pop festivals are characterized by a
fascination with magnitude and pyrotechnics. Like TV soaps, they do not
shy from the superficial and mundane, as illustrated by the melodies and
lyrics to which main stage crowds sing along. Many of the synthesizer riffs
and ostinatos resemble elements of top 40 pop songs. Finally, the EDM
festivalscape is industry-based. By 2015, it had become dominated by two
corporate entities, SFX-IDT and Live Nation-Insomniac, which by then
owned all of the festivals mentioned in the opening paragraph (except
Sunburn).
How is industry-based entertainment commonly studied? There are
traditions dedicated to this in the humanities within film studies, television
studies and cultural studies from which popular music studies and other areas
have drawn much inspiration. These traditions have developed conceptual
approaches to studying texts and audience experiences, as in semiotics and
reception studies (Hall 1980; Fiske 1990). Semiotics could be relevant for
analysing how EDM pop festivals are differentiated from transformational
festivals and boutique festivals, for instance, through their appeal to different
lifestyle values, each gaining meaning in relation to one another through the
principle of difference. Semiotics could also deliver analyses of the ‘language’
of EDM pop, its visual festival design and its discursive realities as a new
global fashion (Bogart 2012; Dargis 2013) and a re-branding of 1990s rave
culture (Reynolds 2012). Reception studies, moreover, is relevant for studying
how meanings are produced in live and socially mediated consumption. So

semiotics and reception studies are relevant for understanding the culture,
but to understand its industry dimensions we need to consider two other
traditions, namely culture industry studies and political economy (Hall
1981; Ryan 1992). The theory of soft shell is particularly useful in this
study because it offers an explanation of the dynamics in the processes of
popularization and corporatization that EDM is undergoing.
Soft shell theory

The concept of soft shell originates in Richard Peterson’s magisterial Creating
Country Music: Fabricating Authenticity (Peterson 1997). The book is the
product of twenty-five years of field research on the evolution of country
music into a genre with a distinct place in the corporate music industry, from
the first commercial recordings in the early 1920s to the institutionalization
of the genre in the early 1950s. A sociologist of culture industry, Peterson
identifies a dynamic tension between a perceived core of the genre and its
softer shell. The book is written as an empirical history, and the soft shell
concept is presented in the form of an empirical typology and narrative, but
the ideas can be adopted into a more general discourse for understanding
similar processes in other genres. Consider the following framing applicable
to electronic dance music (replacing the distinction ‘hard vs. soft country’
with ‘underground vs. pop EDM’):
The basic justification for hard country is that it represents the authentic
tradition of the music called country and that it is by and for those
steeped in the tradition. The corresponding justification for soft country
is that it melds country with pop music to make it enjoyable to the much
larger numbers of those not born in to or knowledgeable about country
music. The leading hard-core artists have received the most attention
from contemporary commentators and later scholars as well. At the
same time, the leading soft shell artists of an era have tended to be more
popular with audiences and to make more money than their hard-core
counterparts (Peterson 1997: 150).
Peterson offers typologies and rich descriptions, but he does not offer a
theory in the strict sense of explanations in a general and abstract language,
although elements thereof can be deduced from his writing. At the core of
his thinking about the term soft shell is a core-boundary metaphor, which
appears in descriptions of contrasting of musical styles, artist personae,
audiences, production systems (independent vs. corporate) and media spaces
(local genre radio vs. national top 40). Peterson, moreover, adopts the term
soft shell into a historical narrative of the genre’s industrialization. While

Peterson argues that hard and soft have co-existed throughout the history
of the genre, it is clear that the relation between the two changes with
corporate co-optation (in general, only the soft shell is co-opted). Peterson
describes how soft country co-evolved with radio-based country music in
the 1930s. In this process, the industry worked to smooth over the raw
edges of the genre to establish it as family entertainment and increase its
popularity with audiences beyond those who identified as fans of the music.
This industry-driven popularization is a key aspect of soft shell dynamics
(Peterson 1997: 229), and it is this point I interpret in the contemporary
context in outlining the new festival economy provided on the following
pages. The focus of the outline is the economic functions of festivals in a
variety of commercial contexts outside the conventional boundaries of the
festival sector and culture. Corporate culture industry develops, promotes
and exploits soft shell culture. Intrinsic to this process is the influence
of interests and logics outside genre spheres, of genre-specialized artists,
producers and fans.
A distinction can be made between micro and macro formations of soft
shell. At the micro-level are individual artists and productions, while the
macro-level formation is a collective style that is named and systematically
produced. EDM pop is an example of the latter and has parallels in
country music with the Nashville Sound of the 1960s and in jazz with
Creed Taylors jazz-pop productions of the same decade and later with the
smooth jazz industry. The Nashville Sound and EDM pop are examples of
soft shell formations that created a new image for the genre and the idea
of a new beginning, in part because the mass penetration was so strong
that foundational images of the genre were transformed decades after its
formative stages.2 Soft shell processes in these genres have not subsumed the
genre in its entirety but the processes have affected the overall dynamics of
the genre.
Three evolutions in the economy of

popular music festivals
Industry-based cultural events such as consumer culture music festivals
involve economic activity across a number of local and international
businesses, including musical entertainment, beverages, food, hospitality,
media and transportation. Interest in the economic value chain in the host
2
For a study of country music and jazz, see Holt (2007: chs 3–4).
community has been central to the nominal field of events research within
tourism studies for decades. There, scholars have typically analysed not
the business of the festival organization itself but the impacts of the
festival on other businesses in the community. This has led to a framing of
the festival industry as a mixed industry (Getz 2012). The present chapter
recognizes the value of this insight but does not use the term mixed
industry because industry-based music festivals (1) are primarily framed
within music markets and (2) do not mix with but conduct business with
para-industries of more general commodity markets, such as advertising,
hospitality and media. Few firms in the supply chain work only with
festivals. In the present account, industry-based popular music festivals
are identified as music industry, even as they are embedded in a network
of para-industries.
1. The festival becomes a format for the music business in

the 1990s
Logic: Music markets and headliners
The growing market value of live music in the late 1990s (Krueger 2005)
transformed the role of festivals in the music business. Festivals went from
being viewed as idiosyncratic cultural projects outside the daily business of
the live music industry to becoming a generic format and avenue of commerce
for the music industry as a whole. The transformation happened gradually
during the 1980s and 1990s and peaked with the boom in the 2000s (e.g.
Waddell 2013) when the number of popular music festivals doubled in
many countries and several of the biggest festivals had doubled in size since
the 1980s.3 By the 2000s there were more festivals, bigger festivals, and
corporately owned festivals, some of which had started as a countercultural
festival. Festivals have become one of the main areas of economic activity
for artist agencies, managers and concert agencies. The large-scale festival
became such a lucrative format during the festival boom that many event
and concert promoters began promoting festivals.
The secondary role of festivals in the music industry of the 1970s and 1980s
was reflected in pricing of performing artists. Rock festival promoters, for
3
In addition to Billboard reports in the United States, the international dimension of the festival
boom is backed up by other reports (NIRAS Denmark with Holt 2010; Webster 2014). While
the boom involved an increase in the number and size of rock festivals in many countries, with
even small countries having a couple of festivals with daily crowds of more than, say, 25,000
people can be found in many countries, the big EDM pop festivals examined in this chapter
appear in a smaller number of countries, including Australia, Brazil, Belgium, The Netherlands,
Sweden and the United States.
instance, were able to book artists at a discounted ‘festival rate’ compared

with arena concerts.4 This arrangement eroded when festival headliners
became a major source of revenue for corporate concert promoters in the
2000s. Festival promoters sought to compensate for the growing expenses
by selling one-day tickets. The latter contributed to the rise of an arena
concert culture within the festival, with thousands going mainly for one
headliner, while remaining spectators to the festival culture.
A distinct aspect of this evolution of the festival as an industry format is
the role of headliners in drawing mass audiences. This is mostly the case in
rock and jazz festivals, which are concert-based, but EDM pop festivals, too,
need superstar DJs to reach mass live and media audiences.5 Tomorrowland
and EDC Las Vegas market themselves as event brands, emphasizing the
overall party experience rather than the lineup (Mason 2012; Sherburne
2013), but the lineups continue to feature countless chart-topping DJs that
are featured prominently in livecastings on YouTube and Yahoo! The lineups
also reveal that the EDM pop festival model has stabilized: Tomorrowland,
for instance, consistently drew from the same pool of EDM pop stars every
year between 2010 and 2015, including Avicii, Calvin Harris, Carl Cox,
David Guetta, Deadmau5, Skrillex, Steve Aoki, Swedish House Mafia (with
separate performances by the members after the trio split up in 2013) and
Tiësto. The broad popularity of these DJs to contemporary youth explains
why some among them have been adopted as part of the broader soft shell
of rock and pop festivals such as Bonnaroo, Coachella, Rock Werchter, and
T in the Park.
The intensified market logic has changed festival culture, which has
become more centered around stars and main stage shows and more
standardized as the same stars appear at more festivals owned by the same
corporations with the same facility and service providers. Many festivals
have similar lineups, architectural designs, hospitality services and online
ticketing services. The market competition for headliners results in higher
prices on tickets, food, drinks and more brand sponsorship and thus
drives a general commodification of the festival environment. Market
development, moreover, shapes the design and location of new festivals.
New festivals are created based on market research and a growing emphasis
on commercial rather than cultural motivations; festivals proliferate in
urban parks and former industrial facilities, designing the space primarily
for the consumption of music and leaving out conventional festival spaces
4
Leif Skov, conversation with author, 10 August 2010.
5
Adding superstars to the lineup drove the expansion of rock festivals when the biggest festivals
grew from attracting 15,000 or 20,000 people per day to 40,000 or more during the 1980s
and 1990s.
such as camping and grassroots participant spaces; and one-day tickets are
offered to maximize profits, even though it involves more people coming
for a show and not the multi-day festival experience.
A formative moment in this market and industry evolution happened
when corporate concert promoters began buying shares in rock music
festivals in the 1990s and developed them as brands to grow their appeal
to mainstream consumers and sponsors (Anderton 2011). This business
development culminated during the festival boom in the 2000s when
Live Nation acquired a majority stake in Festival Republic, illustrating
the shift of emphasis from club venues and concerts to festivals within
the corporate live music industry.6 By the early 2010s, Live Nation
owned more than forty festivals in Europe alone, and the acquisitions
accelerated in 2013–2015 when it gained ownership of major EDM
pop and rock music festivals such as Insomniac Events and, the Swedish
EDM pop festival promoter, Stureplansgruppen (Hanley 2015; Sackllah
2015; ‘Live Nation’s New Groove’). Meanwhile, industry mogul Robert
Sillerman who led the corporatization of the rock concert industry with
the company that became Live Nation in 2005 moved on to do the
same in EDM pop in the 2010s. Beginning in 2011, his corporation SFX
Entertainment purchased hundreds of EDM pop events and festivals and
grew media and advertising infrastructures around them. Within a year after
the acquisition of Beatport, for instance, a partnership was established to
market Beatport’s top 20 radio show through Clear Channel’s major-market
hit radio stations (Mason 2014). By 9 October 2013, in celebration of
its initial public offering on the NASDAQ stock market, SFX CEO Sillerman
rang the closing bell with DJ Afrojack. This ceremony marked a culmination
in the corporatization of EDM. Ending his speech with ‘Let’s Dance!’,
Sillerman appeared to be leading the charge in an EDM pop gold rush
(Figure 1.1).
These corporate evolutions have led to similar organizational structures
and models of integration with media and advertising in rock and EDM pop.
This is what culture industry sociologists call institutional isomorphism.
Yet, the situation in each genre is unique. In indie rock, for instance, a
soft shell development in the 1990s and 2000s also involved co-optation
by major record labels, corporate sponsors, and big festivals, but the
music is still defined as an urban niche culture distinct from mass culture
(Holt 2014).
6
Festival Republic emerged from a reorganization of the company Mean Fiddler, which
promoted concerts and managed club venues in London. In 2007, two years after Live Nation
gained ownership, the venue portfolio was sold and the company was rebranded under the
name Festival Republic to concentrate on festivals (‘Festival Republic: About Us’).
FIGURE 1.1 DJ Afrojack and SFX CEO Robert Sillerman at NASDAQ, Times
Square, New York City, 9 October 2013. Photo: Fabian Holt.
2. The festival becomes a generic event to mainstream

society and business in the 2000s
Logic: Service and brand management
In the 1990s, cities were generally uninterested in hosting popular music
festivals or raves. Festival managers were not part of the city’s elite
networks. Dominant mass media stories focused on themes of hedonism,
drugs, deviancy and noise (McKay 2000; St John 2009). The relationship
between popular music festivals and cities was dominated by a perceived
need for minimizing negative impacts such as noise and waste.
The relationship between festivals and cities changed fundamentally
in the 2000s when dominant narratives started focusing on the successful
impact of festivals on city marketing and the local economy within a new
and broader discourse of ‘the eventful city’ and ‘the festival city’ (Richards
and Palmer 2010: 2–3). This shift resulted from several developments
within post-industrial economies. During the 1970s and 1980s, city
governments, informed by private consultancies, started to think of
culture as an economic driver. During those decades, culture-led growth
strategies typically involved museums, sports facilities, amusement parks
and the development of public spaces for middle-class consumption (Zukin
1995). In the 1990s, the cultural event became widely recognized by the
advertising industry as an immersive medium and by city governments

influenced by economic geographer Richard Florida’s ideas about creative
cities (Florida 2002). The fascination with the publicity value of superstar
concerts fuelled, in particular, by a craze of arena construction projects
in the late 1990s and early 2000s, with a handful of O2 arenas being
constructed in major European cities, for instance. The arena trend was
soon followed by a growing interest in outdoor popular music festivals
and events because of their ability to transform the cityscape into a festive
landscape. City center festivals and raves are given permission to use
public spaces because they stimulate consumption and have the capacity
to produce positive images of the city as an attractive destination for
mass numbers of young people. This mindset has stimulated support of
such diverse events as the Love Parade in Germany (and its international
counterparts) and EDC in Las Vegas (Hitzler and Nye 2011; Jasper and
Magaudda 2013).
As city governments and corporate sponsors approached various kinds
of events from an economic logic, a regime of generic values arose, which
applied to music festivals as well as film festivals, fashion weeks, sport
events and other kinds of pop culture events (‘Big Brand Sponsors Target
Music Festivals’). Generic values include quantitative measures such as
the number of visitors and spending in hotels and restaurants. The generic
logic also extended to the style of communication. Events across the diverse
cultural landscape adopted the same mass communication and marketing
techniques such as theming and visual identity. They also adopted the
discourse of economic and marketing impacts from the tourism and
advertising industry to rationalize public spending and gain access to
corporate sponsors and political elites (Getz 2012).7 Industry festivals now
routinely manage their events as brands and commission impact studies
to communicate their economic value to stakeholders. Insomniac Events,
for instance, has commissioned economic impact studies almost every year
since 2010 from the Los Angeles consultancy Beacon Economics, which
has many clients in the sports events industry and in the public sector (Shah
2015). SFX-IDT commissioned a similar study from the same company on
the first TomorrowWorld festival in 2013 (Ruggieri 2014). These studies
play a role in countering skepticism of drug use, but above all situate the
festivals in the top industry tier of culture and sports events. In the case of
Tomorrowland, the enthusiasm of the host community has evolved into a
challenge to brand management because a growing number of people and
organizations are associating themselves with the festival to capitalize on
I have witnessed how events use the impacts discourse in multiple situations in Roskilde and
7
Copenhagen in my local role as an events expert at Roskilde University since 2006.

its popularity even if they are not representing the style and values of the
festival.8
3. The festival becomes a social media event in the 2010s

Logic: Social media metrics and mass culture semiotics
Before the international mass penetration of Facebook and YouTube in the
late 2000s, music festivals depended on broadcast radio and television for
mass exposure. In Euro-America, television coverage was limited to concert
broadcasts from a small number of big rock music festivals, which continue
to dominate. The evolution of the BBC’s coverage of Glastonbury is a case in
point: When the BBC started television broadcasting from Glastonbury in the
mid-1990s, about twenty staff produced eight hours of daily broadcasting for
an estimated audience of one million people. Within a few years, the broadcasts
moved to a more popular channel, and by 2015 the BBC had about 200 people
producing live streams across multiple radio, television and online channels
(‘Glastonbury TV’). The BBC covers no other festival with the same intensity.9
Few, if any, national media corporations provide television coverage of EDM
festivals. The music director of National Public Radio (NPR) in the United
States, for instance, explains that they focus on music discovery and find it
increasingly challenging to do that, showing awareness of, but not explicitly
naming, the processes of commodification and massification.10 NPR’s music
discovery, however, focuses mainly on genres such as rock, folk and classical
music and not so much on electronic dance music.
In the early 2010s, festival mediations expanded dramatically beyond
broadcast media and into socially mediated televisuality. Televisual online
mediations had happened since the early 1990s, but did not proliferate until
popular social media had created an infrastructure for audiences and for a new
media industry looking for live content to attract audiences and advertisers.
In this advertising-based digital economy dominated by Google, festivals
generate traffic and brand value for sponsors and media corporations such
as Google, Facebook and Yahoo!, and their televisual mediations of festivals
have in turn created a new source of revenue for festivals. The digital realm
is a new source of revenue for the live music industry.
This evolution can be illustrated from the perspective of Tomorrowland,
which is staged in a national park outside Antwerpen (Figure 1.2). The festival
started in 2005 by the Belgian branch of ID&T and was inspired by the
company’s Mysteryland festival (1993–) near Amsterdam. Mysteryland has a
8
Koen Lemmens and Christophe Van den Branden, ID&T, interview with author,
24 January 2013.
9
Andrew Rogers, senior producer at the BBC, interview with author, 1 April 2015.
10
Anya Grundman, director of NPR, interview with author, 4 February 2015.
FIGURE 1.2 Tomorrowland main stage 2013. Photo: Fabian Holt.
more hardstyle profile and fewer EDM pop stars (some DJs have graduated
to Tomorrowland as they reached a mass market). Tomorrowland adopted
Mysteryland’s Disney-style design and New Age pop spiritualism, as apparent
in the fairy-tale decorations, in the naming of the festival and its individual
areas, and in the location in a park area with trees and lakes. Tomorrowland
also adopted the motto ‘Yesterday is history. Today is a gift. Tomorrow
is mystery’. The festival’s soft shell orientation created a more gender-
balanced audience with about 40 per cent women, contrasting the more
male-dominated audiences at ID&T’s raves in the 1990s.11 Tomorrowland
is universally known by the male festival audience, also online, to attract
women with appeal to advertising and fashion industry images of beauty.
What is less known is that many males at the festival aspire to similar body
aesthetics, typically shaved, shorthaired, wearing H&M-style summer pants
and sporting a shaved, muscular torso. These elements – the fairy-tale design,
the park, the stars, the pretty women and men, and the spectacular main stage
architecture – have all been exploited for their visual appeal in the digital
mediations of the festival.
It was the marketers of Tomorrowland who gradually built a digital
sphere for the festival. Their first videos for YouTube in the late 2000s can be
described as reportage, just like the other festival videos at the time produced
11
This information is based on interviews with managers at ID&T’s offices in Antwerpen in
January 2013. The managers also shared consumer data with me.
by other festivals and by amateurs. The marketers then decided to produce

a more ambitious video of a Moby show at the main stage in 2009. For
that video, they developed a more elaborate stage design with fireworks and
upgraded the equipment for producing a higher image quality. Enthusiastic
audience responses encouraged marketers to go further in this direction and
develop a style of cinematic festival video with image quality and editing
at Hollywood industry standards. These immersive movies were framed as
‘trailers’ and ‘after movies’ and became folkloric texts in EDM pop culture,
framing the festival experience for international audiences. The co-evolution
of the physical festival world and the social media movies culminated in the
defining 2011 after movie, which received more than 100 million views on
YouTube within a year.
Why has ID&T continued to expand the Tomorrowland video productions
when tickets have sold out repeatedly since 2010? The festival’s YouTube
channel features hundreds of TV-quality videos, mostly recordings of single
DJ sets. The evolution in production style also suggests growing ambitions,
articulated through a Lord of the Rings–style cinematography. The
explanation for this cinematic intensification is that the festival marketers are
affected by the massive audience enthusiasm and that the mediations generate
sponsorship revenues. The more the livecasts and videos are watched online,
the more negotiation power the festival has with its business partners, and
the more it earns.12 The development is stimulated by the broader advertising
economy of social media. Since Google acquired YouTube in 2009, it has
worked strategically to grow its competitive advantage with the film and
television business. YouTube launched a ‘premium content strategy’ in 2011
in which live events such as mass-market music festivals play a key role.
YouTube partnered with festivals for exclusive live streaming, including
Tomorrowland, whose marketing team embraced the opportunity, viewing
YouTube as ‘a global TV station’.13
Media evolutions have played a major role in the commercial development
of events throughout history. An illustrative example is the television history
of the Olympic Games, which has produced its own research literature.
Following a broader convergence between sports and television in the
1960s, television replaced ticket sales as the main source of revenue for
the Olympics by 1972 and since the late 1970s more than half of the TV
rights fees have come from commercial networks in the United States (Real
2014). Mass media broadcasting created the basis for an evolution in
corporate sponsorship, which became a major source of revenue with the
1984 Games in Los Angeles. These developments generated debates about
the consequences of mediatization and commodification. Scholars continue
12
The festival marketers at ID&T whom I interviewed in January 2013 said that I was correct
in making this assumption, but they did not disclose any details of the economic arrangement.
13
Koen Lemmens, ID&T, interview with author, 24 January 2013.
to debate whether the media had a symbiotic or parasitic relationship

with sports. Some argued that the growing influence of stars and sponsors
challenged the fundamental Olympic values of equality and democracy
(Roche 2000: 166; Real 2014). Moreover, television broadcasts altered
the balance between the ritual elements of the event, with more emphasis
on spectacle. It also boosted the transformation of sports into consumer
culture. At the level of audience experience, the capacity of moving images to
communicate emotional information intensified the audience experience of
crowd emotions and star personae, thus contributing to the rise of celebrity
culture, with Michael Jordan as a pioneering example. Global mediations
of Jordan’s playing and his achievements were exploited commercially in
celebrity-style ads for Nike’s Air Jordan shoe model from the mid-1980s.
In those ads, Jordan was presented not as a conventional athlete but styled
as a celebrity and with a line of lifestyle products (clothing and fragrance)
named after him (Kellner 2002: 64). The media further created and
exploited his celebrity status by reporting on his income and his life with
a 56,000 square foot mansion, sports cars and celebrity friends. EDM pop
DJ stars operate in a different sphere of nightlife and party culture and are
not praised by news media, for instance, the way Jordan was, but they are
completely embedded in a celebrity culture. The handful of highest-earning
DJs are on Forbes’ Top 100 list, featured in tabloid media stories about
their private jets, parties with Paris Hilton, videos with female pop stars,
luxury apartments in celebrity destinations such as Miami and Hollywood,
residencies in Las Vegas and paparazzi photos. David Guetta had his name
and picture on a series of Coca-Cola bottles in 2012 and met with the
United Nations general secretary in 2013 to support World Humanitarian
Day. In 2015, Calvin Harris started dating Taylor Swift and modelled for
Armani in a global campaign for their men’s underwear.
In my analysis of Tomorrowland as a social media event (Holt 2016),
I argue that the marketers used social media to expand consumption and
marketing into an open-ended continuum, equivalent to the transformation
of news media into a 24/7 cycle in the digital age. In this continuum,
mediations circulate across the pages of corporate festivals and private
persons, bringing traces of festival culture into the everyday through a more
direct and complex relation between industry and audience. Mediatization
processes are contingent to the specificity of changing media systems, but
the changing balance between the ritual elements of the event and the
multi-level commodification are obvious parallels with the mediatization
of the Olympics and offer a perspective on the conversation about EDM
pop festivals as a culture of sensations and spectacle as indicated by the
editor’s introduction to this volume. Most of my Tomorrowland informants,
online and at the festival, were not yet thirty years old and did not have
the experience to see the present moment as the result of a series of
transformations in the history of EDM.
Conclusion
The chapter was motivated by the realization that the popularization of
EDM in commercial media and festivals is one of the major developments in
early twenty-first century pop culture but that research is lacking on the core
dimensions. The aim of this chapter has therefore been to offer an analytical
mapping of the genre and industry dimensions of EDM pop, paying special
attention to its place within the broader economy of popular music festivals.
The sociology of genre and industry served as a useful tool for a raw framing
in the beginning of the chapter. Genre theory opens up for structural and
comparative thinking about a music, its media, discourses and its networks
of production and consumption. Comparative thinking about similar
situations in other genres in the past is absent in writing about EDM pop.
The structural similarities with earlier developments in country music and
jazz motivated the adoption of the soft shell concept from culture industry
sociology. What initially might seem as a contrasting of aesthetics within a
given genre is actually part of more complex dynamics involving interests
outside the genre’s own distinct networks. EDM pop can be added to a long
list of examples of how the corporate music industry popularizes genres
for a mainstream market. Such soft shell formations, therefore, cannot be
adequately analysed within the boundaries of the individual genre. This
chapter situated EDM pop in a broader popular music economy in which
rock festivals in particular have had an instrumental role in the evolution of
the corporate festival industry and the image of popular music festivals as
desirable destination events for local host communities. EDM pop festivals
have pushed this evolution further by adopting visual branding practices
from the film and events industry and by their aesthetics of mass culture
euphoria. The exploration of EDM pop within broader contexts beyond
EDM indicates that its mass-market success can be attributed to a number
of factors in what might be described as a perfect storm: Pop stars such as
Madonna and Rihanna were looking for inspiration for a modern sound;
a new generation of social media created a platform for mediating visually
appealing festival worlds; neoliberal city governments with populist cultural
views embraced pop culture events for millennials; a corporate festival
industry had evolved and was ready to co-opt EDM; and, finally, there
was a crisis in the recording industry and a sense that rock music was not
evolving much anymore, with rock festival promoters complaining about
the declining supply of headliners, and EDM pop having a generational
appeal to millennial youth.
The chapter thus makes the case for looking beyond the internal hard
vs. soft dualism than in Peterson’s analysis. When soft shell formations
evolve into global mass cultures, they exist rather distantly from the hard
core and can therefore meaningfully be analysed as relatively separate
areas. The framing of EDM pop as a mass culture formation motivated my
emphasis on the genre’s life in the wider pop culture mainstream. Peterson
focused on the life of soft shell within the genre because he was studying
the genre’s history and developed the distinction in this context. Soft shell
should not be confined to the dualism of its boundary metaphor because
it is also a matter of how a genre is popularized outside its own territory.
Judging from past examples, we can assume that a soft shell formation
has a shelf life in the mainstream, but also deeply transforms the genre’s
boundaries and identity, instigating ongoing negotiations with changing
notions of mainstream pop music.
The general methodological point of this chapter is that genre theory has
broad relevance for mapping new cultural formations, even when they seem
to grow away from genre and do not position themselves discursively in a
genre. The basic vocabulary of genre theory does not have to be re-invented
for every genre. Existing concepts developed decades ago can prove useful
and help recognize the general and unique aspects of a situation. Once
macro-structural mappings have been offered, they can be critiqued and
nuanced by more specialized studies.
Acknowledgements
I would like to express gratitude to Graham St John for his ambitious and
rigorous editorial suggestions on early drafts of this chapter. I am also
very grateful for comments from Tami Gadir and Francesco Lapenta. In
addition, I should like to collectively thank the many festival professionals
with whom I have had formal and informal conversations since 2006.
Without their input, the industry analysis of this chapter would not have
been possible.
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CHAPTER TWO
Stereosonic and Australian

Commercial EDM Festival Culture
Ed Montano
Stereosonic has really gone in leaps and bounds over the last
couple of years. That can be attributed to the DJs and the artists
that they book. We’re here now in Sydney with a capacity crowd
of over 60,000 people. Many years ago I remember here in
Australia a lot of the media were talking about ‘dance music is
dead, it’s over, superstar DJs are done and that’s it’, and here we
are, 2011, and you can’t get any more people in this place, it’s
unbelievable.
CARL COX.1
At festivals you always get what I like to call a ‘collective energy’

– you get so many people that are here just for the same reason.
FERRY CORSTEN.2
It’s 26 November 2011 and I’m at Sydney Showgrounds, the events precinct

at Sydney Olympic Park, a site developed for the 2000 Olympic Games. But
the event is no sporting competition. I am here for the first leg of Stereosonic,
one of Australia’s most popular music festivals and its biggest EDM event.
1
Carl Cox, interview with the author (Sydney), 26 November 2011.
2
Ferry Corsten, interview with the author (Sydney), 26 November 2011.
With an expected attendance above 50,000, the main stage is located in ANZ
Stadium, a venue that typically holds national soccer matches or concerts by
only the most popular of popular music artists. The eventual crowd figure
is estimated at over 60,000, with the stadium arena closed off at one point
due to overcrowding (Squires 2011). Jump forward seven days and I am
at Melbourne Showgrounds for the third leg of Stereosonic 2011.3 There’s
a slight feeling of déjà vu. Recalling my Sydney experience, stages have the
same names, the same artists are on at the same or similar times playing
the same or similar sets, and the same logos of corporate sponsors appear
on posters and flash across huge screens. Jump forward twenty-four hours
and I’m at Brisbane Showgrounds, for the fifth4 and final leg of Stereosonic
2011. The déjà vu returns. Same stage names, artists, sets and branding.
The scale of each event is striking. While short of the audience numbers that
flock to globally renowned festivals such as Glastonbury and Coachella, for
a sole genre focused festival in Australia, Stereosonic represents a pinnacle.
This chapter is intended as a case study for an analysis of the industry
mechanisms that underpin the promotion and staging of EDM festivals,
and the subsequent impacts of these events on local scenes. My focus is on
Stereosonic, an event that in 2012 attracted ‘the largest recorded crowd
for a music festival’ in Australia (Napieralski 2012).5 The chapter seeks to
unpack some of the industry perspectives surrounding the festival through
an analysis of its development from a one-day Melbourne-only event in
2007, through to its two-day multi-city format in 2013 and 2014, and
the sale of its parent company Totem OneLove to global dance culture
conglomorate SFX Entertainment for $75 million in 2013 (Fitzsimons
2013; Jarvis 2013).
I locate the rise of Stereosonic at the commercial peak of EDM culture
in Australia. In much the same way as ‘the repression of rave culture in
the UK in the early 1990s led to the emergence of corporate clubbing in
that nation’ (D’Andrea 2007: 223), I argue that the codes of practice that
were introduced into the Australian party landscape in the 1990s served
to push dance party organizers and promoters in a more professional and
commercial direction. Stereosonic sits within an Australian dance music
festival landscape that has been developing since the 1990s. Festivals such
3
The second leg of Stereosonic in Perth takes place the day after the first leg.
4
The fourth leg of Stereosonic in Adelaide occurs concurrently with the Melbourne leg.
To facilitate this, acts and timeslots are shuffled around, with artists flying between the two
cities.
5
This chapter focuses on Stereosonic and contextualizes the festival in relation to other
commercial, mainstream festivals. As such, I’m not concerned with other Australian dance
music festivals that sit outside of the mainstream and incorporate a broader arts and lifestyle
aesthetic, such as Earthcore and Rainbow Serpent.
STEREOSONIC AND AUSTRALIAN COMMERCIAL EDM FESTIVAL CULTURE 47
FIGURE 2.1 Stereosonic, Sydney 2012. Photo: Drew Ressler/Rukes.com.
as Future Music Festival, Good Vibrations, Parklife, Vibes on a Summer’s

Day and We Love Sounds have propelled EDM culture into the mainstream
(Montano 2011a). The nocturnal domain in which DJs and clubbers
traditionally interacted has been partially replaced by daytime festivals that
are played out in open public spaces such as parks, stadiums and cultural
quarters. The chapter highlights how the festival experience has become
one of the main sites of EDM consumption in Australia, and considers the
commercialization and commodification of the EDM festival experience
through the perspectives of industry insiders. Such discussion is relevant
not only for understandings of EDM culture but also, more broadly, for
considering the contemporary festival experience and its cultural and
economic meanings.
The chapter is grounded in over a decade of ethnographic research and
participant-observation in the Sydney and Melbourne commercial EDM
scenes. Aside from attending club nights, gigs and festivals, this has involved
work in various music retail stores (such as Sydney’s iconic Central Station
Records), and writing for websites inthemix and pulseradio.net. My work
in music retail located me as an ‘insider’ in the scene, a beneficial position
for establishing contacts and forming relationships with research subjects
(see Montano 2013a). Eight key interviews form the core of the primary
research material that informs the chapter. These include an interview with
Richie McNeill, one of the founders of Stereosonic, who has an extensive
history of involvement in Australian dance music culture as a DJ, promoter,

record label owner and as the festival organizer responsible for pivotal
events such as Apollo Music Festival and Two Tribes, while also heading
companies such as Hardware and Totem Industries.6 Alongside this I
draw on interviews with John Curtin, who at the time of our conversation
was Marketing Manager for Stereosonic, and Frank Cotela, a founder of
Stereosonic and now CEO of OneLove, one of Australia’s main electronic
dance music labels.7 Other interviewees include Ant Celestino, A&R
Manager at OneLove and a dance music producer; Trent Grimes, a DJ and
General Manager of Soapbox Agency that represents several of Australia’s
dance music DJs, producers and artists; Jesse Desenberg, a producer–
DJ who performs under the alias Kid Kenobi and was voted Australia’s
number one DJ in the annual inthemix DJ poll in 2003, 2004 and 2005;
Katie Cunningham, one of the editors of inthemix; and Henry Johnstone,
who at the time of our interview was editor of pulseradio.net. The chapter
thus focuses on the perspectives of three main industry participant types:
promoters, DJs and journalists. Alongside these key interviews I draw on
other interviews conducted over the course of my research. I also utilize
various online media sources and print street press, and the promotional
material of festivals, which includes everything from flyers and billboard
posters to social media posts and after movies.
My attendance at multiple legs of Stereosonic in 2011 was the result
of winning the inthemix annual contributor competition for my work
throughout the year for the dance music website. The prize included an
all-expenses-paid trip to the three east coast legs of the festival, the
opportunity to interview some of the headlining DJs and the publication
of my reviews (Montano 2011b,c). Experiencing Stereosonic in this way
was an opportunity to sample numerous great dance music acts. Yet the
replication of the festival in each city, and the similarities I witnessed, led
me on a search for the local and to question the impact of these events on
local scenes. After more than a decade of researching the commercial EDM
scene in Sydney and exploring its reliance on the circuit of international DJs
and the global flow of dance music culture (Montano 2013b), Stereosonic,
with its abundance of international acts playing music mostly sourced from
overseas, seems to be the culmination of Australian dance music culture’s
drive to the global stage. In the process, the local appears to have been
6
For detail on McNeill’s history and various dance music industry endeavours and exploits, see
Fitzsimons 2014a,b,c. At the time of our interview, McNeill had left Stereosonic to take time
out from the industry.
7
The label arm of OneLove was kept as a separate company following the acquisition of Totem
OneLove by SFX. Cotela, like McNeill, left Totem soon after the sale, and is now expanding
the scope of the operations of OneLove to include publishing, management and live touring.
left behind, overcome by the commercialization of the transnational mega-

festival that can be easily transported piece-by-piece between geographically
dispersed cities and re-assembled in mirror image.
Stereosonic is an example of ‘the cloned festival, which is commodified,
standardised and [has] no special relationship with place’ and which has a
‘focus on big names and on tried and tested performers’ (Newbold et al.
2015: xxi). In his article on ‘Oz Rock’, Homan suggests that in Australia
‘evidence exists of a variety of imperialising tendencies within national/
regional scenes, distinct from the external circulation of global pressure’
(2000: 32, italics in original). This may be the case for rock culture, but
it appears less evident in Australian EDM culture. While Stereosonic has
always featured local acts, its internationalized presence has had various
impacts on local scenes and has generated a raft of diverging perspectives on
the cultural and social value of festivals to EDM culture in Australia.
At the time of writing, large-scale music festivals in Australia are in
decline, with a seeming shift towards a more boutique experience (Jones
2015; McCabe 2015). Henry Johnstone describes how
Stereosonic has been one of the last really big [festivals] to survive.
The market is moving towards smaller boutique things. People want a bit
of a different experience . … [Festivals] have grown into this huge, huge
thing. The bubble is going to burst, and I think it’s starting to happen a
little bit. How long it’s going to take, who knows? Maybe Stereosonic
will stay above water because it’s been bought by SFX. But look at Big
Day Out, that’s gone. Everything is dropping, and I think it’s moving
to smaller, a couple of thousand capacity events that don’t even have
headliners like Stereosonic. They will have second tier acts as their
headliners, and it’s more about the experience.8
Stereosonic encapsulates a period in Australian EDM culture, and popular

music culture more broadly, when there was a turn towards a super-sized live
experience spread across multiple stages in the outdoors. The recent collapse
of Future Music Festival (Kembrey, Vincent and Zuel 2015), Stereosonic’s
closest competitor, and Stereosonic’s return in 2015 to a one-day format, is
arguably evidence that festivals, like the acts they feature, go through a cycle
of popularity. This is further emphasized by the demise of other large-scale
Australian music festivals such as Big Day Out and Soundwave, the former
associated with indie and mainstream rock (despite the presence of a tent
8
Henry Johnstone, interview with the author (Sydney), 4 December 2014. Interest in the smaller
boutique festival can be seen in the 2016 re-launch of iconic Australian dance music festival
Vibes on a Summer’s Day after a thirteen-year absence, at its original (smaller) venue of the
Bondi Beach Pavilion in Sydney.
that featured electronic music acts), and the latter built around heavy metal
and hard rock culture. For Frank Cotela, this is all part of a broader cycle of
market shifts and popularity swings:
EDC in Las Vegas is sold out. Tomorrowland in Belgium is sold out.

There is a market out there. You’ve got to remember, nothing’s forever.
We had the [OneLove] club night. We knew at 10 years that’s it, over,
see you later. We were coming up to 10 years of Stereosonic. It’s like
we won the lottery by selling it to SFX. If that didn’t happen, we would
have considered changing the format of Stereosonic. Even though in its
heyday it was doing 240,000 people, it dropped down to 180,000. That’s
still big numbers, it’s still the biggest festival in Australia, [but] you have
to adapt . … Big Day Out was a classic example of a festival that just
got caught up in its own world. No one cared about Metallica coming
out. No one cared about those big acts that they were paying millions of
dollars to get. You have to keep changing.9
On top of this fluctuating festival landscape, SFX stands on the edge

of either bankruptcy or takeover (Anonymous 2015a; Mac 2015; Sisario
2015). Its frenzied global buying spree of various EDM platforms and
events companies seems increasingly like a series of mis-timed business
takeovers, as part of CEO Robert Sillerman’s desire to participate in the
‘increasingly internationalised touring circuit controlled by oligopolistic and
territorially organised promotion companies’ (Gibson and Connell 2012:
15). An analysis of this global corporatization and commercialization is
beyond the scope of this chapter, but some related issues are addressed in
interview material. In short, I write this at a critical moment for Stereosonic,
Australian dance music culture, Australian music festivals and the global
electronic dance music scene. As Gibson asks, ‘are there limits to the markets
for festivals? Can places and audiences be “festivalled-out”?’ (2007: 79).
Music festivals in Australia

The Australian live music market is unique in that many of its festivals
‘travel’ to capital cities over a one- or two-week period, as opposed to
‘static’ events such as Creamfields in the United Kingdom and Ultra Music
Festival in the United States. Stereosonic visits the five state capital cities in
Australia. Other Australian music festivals that travel (or did travel when
they existed) include Big Day Out, Future Music Festival, Good Vibrations,
Groovin the Moo, Listen Out, Parklife and Soundwave. Stereosonic’s move
9
Frank Cotela, interview with the author (Melbourne), 4 May 2016.
in 2013 and 2014 from a one-day to two-day format made it the weekend
society of EDM culture in Australia. Globally, Stereosonic sits in similar
festival terrain as other ‘hedonistic playgrounds’ (O’Grady 2013: 30) such
as Creamfields in the United Kingdom, Tomorrowland in Belgium and EDC
and Ultra Music Festival in the United States, in its position as a branded
mega-event that features major headlining international DJs performing
in a stadium or some other vast performance space. This breaks down
the closeness of the dancefloor–DJ relationship of club culture, where the
audience and the artist are now separated in a fashion akin to that witnessed
at rock concerts. Combined with an abundance of corporate sponsorship
and targeted branding, such festivals reflect how EDM culture has become
‘a hyper-commercial global phenomenon bursting with brand recognition’
(St John 2009a: 11).
Popular music festivals and their associated social and cultural domains,
and the broader aesthetic of festivalization, have attracted increasing scholarly
attention in recent years. As Cummings notes, ‘[t]he contemporary music
festival had its origins in the 1960s British and American outdoor rock and
pop festivals in terms of physical layout, style and content’ (2014: 170). Less
is known about events outside of the Anglo-American axis of rock culture.
Cummings (2008) sketches a brief history of rock festivals in Australia,
as does Gibson (2007: 68–69) who notes the increasing urbanization,
commercialization and internationalization of Australian music festivals in
FIGURE 2.2 Stereosonic, Sydney 2012. Photo: Drew Ressler/Rukes.com.

the 1990s with events like Big Day Out and Homebake. Gibson and Connell
(2012) have undertaken extensive research into Australian festival culture in
regional areas, locating their work in a wider global phenomenon of the past
couple of decades during which ‘the number of music festivals has grown
exponentially … as people celebrate local and regional cultures, as musical
styles diversify, and as councils, business coalitions and non‑profit groups
use festivals to both promote tourism and stimulate regional development’
(Gibson and Connell 2012: 3). This increase in popularity of festivals is
echoed by Kjus and Danielsen, who describe how ‘[r]ecent decades have seen
a substantial growth in music festivals’ (2014: 663). In an industrial context,
this growth is evidenced in the ever-expanding transnational operations of
events companies such as Live Nation, with Morey et al. referring to ‘the
corporatization of the festival industry over the past 15 years’ (2014: 253)
and the promotion of branded festivals by these companies.
Research has been undertaken on key issues that circulate around
Australian music festival culture, such as: audience demographics, brands
and festival sponsorship (Cummings 2008; Carah 2010); fashion and the
construction of identity at festivals (Cummings 2006); and regional and
rural festivals (Gibson 2007; Gration et al. 2011; Gibson 2014). Within
EDM culture, there are festivals that cater to a variety of different genres,
lifestyles and movements, with many receiving the attention of scholars from
around the world. These happenings and related topics include: mixed genre
events (Lalioti 2013); psytrance gatherings and visionary arts festivals (St
John 2009b, 2012, 2014a); Australian bush ‘doofs’ (Luckman 2014); now-
iconic mega-events such as Burning Man (St John 2014b); the challenges of
conducting research fieldwork in the festival environment (O’Grady 2013);
and the connections between ravers, New Age travellers and anti-road
protestors, and the ‘festive, carnival or festival-like performative elements’
of these cultures, in Britain during the 1990s (Martin 2014).
Clearly music festivals represent a rich field of enquiry, generating an
extensive body of research that explores numerous social, cultural and
economic issues. This exhaustive exploration should come as no surprise,
given that festivals are unique and complex events that exist within disparate
societies. Festivals cut across art and industry, and ‘do not take place in
a vacuum, they are the result of a range of social and cultural pressures,
organisational and management decisions, and artist and audience
expectations’ (Newbold et al. 2015: xv).
Stereosonic and Australian EDM culture

The seed for Stereosonic was planted after the separation of the team of
promoters behind the Two Tribes festival. Two Tribes was launched in
1999 as a joint venture between Richie McNeill’s Hardware Corp and
Mark James’ Future Entertainment. Between 2002 and 2006, Two Tribes
was Australia’s most popular dance music festival, with shows in various
state capital cities. After the two promoters split, as they ‘were moving in
different directions musically’,10 James established Future Music Festival,
and McNeill, under his new company Totem Industries, set up Stereosonic.
Starting in 2007 as one event in Melbourne, 2008 saw the addition of
Adelaide, Brisbane and Perth, with Sydney added in 2009. Having set up the
event in partnership with the team behind OneLove Music Group, a record
label, artist agency and touring company, the two companies eventually
amalgamated into Totem OneLove, the entity that SFX purchased for $75
million in 2013, which McNeill described as like ‘winning the lottery I guess’
(Fitzsimons 2014c).
The progression of Australia’s EDM culture from underground raves
and warehouse parties to commercial mainstream mega-festival gatherings
can in part be attributed to government policy. With its roots in UK rave
culture that flowed south down transnational routes travelled by expats
(Murphie and Scheer 1992), and in the gay and lesbian cultures of the
1980s (Brennan-Horley 2007: 124), contemporary Australian EDM
culture represents a fusion of ‘international influences and sounds with
already present local communities and practices’ (Luckman 2014: 192).
As happened in the United Kingdom, similar processes of fighting against
and negotiating with government have influenced the development of club
culture and dance music events. In the United Kingdom, the free festival
culture of the late 1980s and early 1990s driven by rave sound systems,
such as Spiral Tribe, suffered from increasing suppression (Anderton 2011:
149; see also St John 2009a: 28–64). This culminated in the implementation
of the Criminal Justice Act in 1994, widely cited as a key influence in
driving the clubbing industry to become more organized and commercial
(Anderton 2011: 146). In Australia, the death of Sydney clubber Anna
Wood in 1995 from ecstasy-related causes generated a moral panic that
increased the public profile of club culture and led to government policy
responses, such as the Code of Practice for Dance Parties implemented
by the New South Wales (NSW) government in 1998. As Brennan-Horley
notes (2007: 125), the strict compliance criteria this introduced resulted in
less ‘guerrilla-style events’ and more parties in established nightclubs that
were driven by commercial concerns. McNeill describes how the increasing
regulatory environment surrounding EDM culture in Australia, combined
with city gentrification, influenced his own promoting practices and the
development of festivals:
Richie McNeill, interview with the author (via Skype), 19 June 2015.

10
Raves and all-night dance parties became harder to do. It was almost
like the festival culture was forced upon people. That shift from all-night
raves to that festival explosion happened when city development drove
those all-night venues away. A lot of those warehouses were converted
into apartments. The urbanization of the cities in the ’90s forced those
raves to just not happen. The docklands [in Melbourne], where I used to
do the Hardware parties, it was just empty sheds and the ships coming
in. Now it’s shops and thousands of apartments. So I think it was just
progress that almost forced the festival culture to explode. I know that
what drove us to do festivals back in the late ’90s was: 1. It was getting
harder to do warehouse events because locations were becoming scarcer
because of inner-city development, and [government] restrictions made
it harder and harder to do things all night; and 2. It turned into quite a
lucrative option, because as day events they became more appealing to a
wider audience – people that were like 30 or 35 and used to go to clubs
in the ’80s and ’90s started coming to these things again because they
were like 12pm to 10pm. It wasn’t so late. Rave culture attracted a crowd
that would party pretty hard. The day events toned it down a little bit. It
became more appealing to a broader audience because it was during the
day. You could be home by midnight and go to work on Monday. That’s
why I think it just exploded so rapidly. There were these people listening
to dance music that were just not coming to these all-night things because
they were pretty raw and in dirty old sheds.11
Chan (1997), Homan (1998), Luckman (2000) and Gibson and Pagan
(n.d.) have identified the potential effect of codes of practice to erode
the underground elements of EDM and push it into the mainstream.
Chan framed this in his 1997 response to what at the time was the NSW
Draft Code of Practice for Dance Parties as a question – ‘The Death of
Diversity?’ – arguing that the code would negatively impact smaller scale
events and promoters because of the increased costs in implementing the
recommendations in the code, and thus ‘promoters will turn to the more
commercially accessible DJs and live acts in order to ensure that they draw
enough crowd to meet their own costs’ (1997: 2). In her article (2000) on
mapping the regulation of dance parties in Australia, Luckman identified
what at the time were the three main documents relating to the official
regulation of dance parties and raves: Western Australian Operational
Guidelines for Rave Parties, Concerts and Large Public Events from 1995;
Operational Guidelines for Dance Parties in South Australia from 1996; and
NSW Code of Practice for Dance Parties and Guidelines for the Conduct
of Dance Parties from 1998. In addition to those, the Victorian government

11
introduced its Code of Practice for Running Safer Dance Parties in 2004,
and more recently its Code of Practice for Running Safer Music Festivals
and Events in 2013. Identifying similar issues of commerciality as Chan,
Luckman suggests that under the guidelines of the documents dance parties
attained a limited legitimacy, but that ‘this legitimacy is highly contingent and
in practice only really afforded to those events organised on a commercial
basis’ (2000: 219). Luckman describes the regulatory guidelines/codes
of practice of state governments as part of a two-fold response to rave
culture alongside harm minimisation programs funded by health ministries,
observing that ‘[d]espite the standing of dance music cultures as mainstream
cultural industries, the consumption of recreational drugs within dance
cultures still gives rise to a familiar discourse of moral panic within media
and governmental portrayals’ (2000: 219).
Fifteen years later, this discourse of moral panic has subsided, a result
of the increased mainstream presence of EDM culture that has been
facilitated by the rise of Stereosonic. This mainstreaming stems from the
professionalization and commercialization of the scene, and certainly the
guidelines and codes of practice have played a role. This development has
also come about through the involvement of ‘sponsors, brands and media’
(Anderton 2011: 146) in the festival landscape, even if ‘there is an enduring
association between festivals and drug culture’ (Anderton 2008: 45).
The death of two patrons at separate legs of Stereosonic 2015 attracted
some media attention (Anonymous 2015b,c) but not on the front page
of any national newspapers. While the moral concern is still evident in
government responses that imply ‘music festivals in Australia could be shut
down permanently if things don’t improve’ (Anonymous 2016), the panic
element seems to have largely dissipated, replaced by a media discourse that
is shifting away from drug prohibition towards pill testing at festivals (Duffy
2015). To counter any moral concern, festival organizers play an active role
in discussions on patron behaviour, as John Curtin highlights:
We do not encourage drug use [and] we work really closely with the
police. In terms of peer education and wanting to encourage people to
do the right thing, we’re right there . … It’s very difficult. We’ve spoken to
the government before about trying to fix issues like binge drinking and
drugs, to make people aware of different things.12
Discussing the fallout and government policy responses to Anna Wood’s

death, Homan identifies how the legislation that was implemented in Britain
in the early 1990s ‘directly or indirectly produced censored dance cultures of
a more static commercial character’ (1998: 70). This commercial character is
John Curtin, interview with the author (Melbourne), 26 June 2015.

12
clearly evident in Stereosonic and other EDM festivals, and thus the codes of
practice of various Australian state governments have had similar censoring
effects. Referencing Chan’s ‘death of diversity’, Homan similarly notes how
codes of practice favour promoters with the finances to stage events that meet
the compliance requirements, which in turn could generate an ‘enduring
aesthetic of conformity’ (1998: 73). Yet access to capital, a commercial
drive and the club scene’s ‘capitalist orientation as an “industry”’ (D’Andrea
2007: 108) do not necessarily result in conformity or a lack of diversity.
In the case of Stereosonic, there is more going on than the performances of
a select few superstar, international headlining DJs, with Katie Cunningham
describing how ‘festivals like Stereosonic bring out so many artists that
maybe wouldn’t come to Australia otherwise’.13 This includes lesser-known
DJs, who are provided with performance opportunities across the multiple
different stages. This is further emphasized by Johnstone:
Stereosonic still take the time to tour more underground artists. This year
[2014] they had Scuba, Nina Kraviz, Kölsch, and I think they are really
trying to foster a general, all-round, encompassing kind of thing. They
could very easily just snub those people, and they don’t, so that’s a good
thing.14
Stereosonic, the local and the global

Festivals impact upon how scene participants engage with global EDM
culture. For D’Andrea, ‘[e]lectronic dance scenes must be considered within
the context of complex globalisation’ (2010: 50). In contrast to government
policies that may actively seek to generate or re-generate local music scenes
and local music activity, dance party codes of practice and guidelines
have indirectly created a globally focused EDM culture in Australia. While
festivals represent localized articulations of EDM, their lineups typically
prioritize international DJs and acts, with locals typically hidden away on
smaller stages or scheduled in early daytime slots. Festivals highlight the
processes of globalization that permeate contemporary EDM scenes ‘in
which local (regional and national) party organizations, producers and DJs
adapt technics, sample popular culture and remix aesthetics circulating as
a result of globalization’ (St John 2012: 8). Stereosonic and other events
make evident how ‘[m]any festivals may be locally derived but they are also
internationally orientated . … Festivals create encounters between the global
Katie Cunningham, interview with the author (Sydney), 4 December 2014.

13
Henry Johnstone, interview with the author (Sydney), 4 December 2014.

14
and the local which challenges and changes both’ (Newbold et al. 2015:
xxiv). The global does not arrive just in the form of international artists or
sounds but also in patrons who come from overseas. As Curtin explains in
regard to Stereosonic, ‘I’d estimate about 15% of our hand-to-hand industry
tickets are sold by our international student promoters. A big part of our
audience is people who are studying [and are] from Asia’.15
From its beginnings, Stereosonic has featured numerous international
EDM headliners, including Armand Van Helden, Calvin Harris, Carl
Cox, Deadmau5, Tiësto, Armin Van Buuren, Avicii, Diplo and Steve Aoki
(among many others). While it features multiple stages with other mid-level
DJs and artists, the international names dominate promotional material.
Occasionally, Australian acts may break through into this top billing, as
Peking Duk, Will Sparks, Stafford Brothers and Tommy Trash have in
recent years, but Stereosonic exemplifies how ‘[t]ensions can be particularly
apparent at major festivals with national and international headline acts,
where local bands struggle to get on stage’ (Gibson 2007: 77; see also Gibson
2014: 153). These tensions can often be seen in online forum comments or
media reports that query the absence of local performers. For the promoters,
however, international names are essential to attract crowds and lend value
to the price of admission, as McNeill explains:
I’m all for supporting Australian music. There are Australian acts who
you may be able to see 6 to 10 times a year . … But the value for the
people is those acts that haven’t been here before or only come once
every 12 or 18 months. The value, we found from our surveys, is in the
acts people haven’t seen before or acts that aren’t here playing every 6
to 8 weeks. We mix it up. We’ve had some great Australian acts because
we love their music and we want to get behind them, and others we
provide because that’s what the punters want to see. There was a real
mix, but it tended to be more internationals because we’re trying to run
an international festival . … We’re considered in the top 10 international
electronic dance music festivals . … It’s a tough debate. [People say] ‘you
don’t put enough Australian artists on’. But we’re not an Australian
festival, we’re an international festival, and that involves the best in the
world in electronic music, whether it’s Australian, or if it’s from Egypt,
or if it’s from Germany or Holland or Japan, so be it. We’re also not a
charity. We’ll support acts where we can, but at the end of the day our
punters in the surveys that we did were, for $130 a ticket, going to see
acts that weren’t here, that they weren’t exposed to, that had a certain
value for them over Australian stuff.16
John Curtin, interview with the author (Melbourne), 26 June 2015.

15

16
Festivals promote an international diversity while adhering to a conformity

encouraged by local codes of practice and guidelines, which makes evident
‘[t]he taming of local practices into manageable sites of stable commerce’
(Homan 2000: 45). While festivals impact upon local scenes in ways that
are both positive and negative, when considering Stereosonic it seems that
any sense of locality is almost erased through ‘deferring to a global aesthetic’
(Homan 2000: 32), as McNeill highlights:
We just focused on trying to bring the best line up each year to Australia and
offer a truly international offering that competes with what’s happening
overseas. More and more people these days are going to Coachella, to
Ultra, to EDC, to Glastonbury, to festivals overseas . … We were always
trying to put on the best show, the best value, look after the punter, but
also have the festival compete with overseas festivals so people would
stay in Australia and come to our festival, and also hopefully attract some
of that travelling market and get Europeans, Asians … about 3% of credit
card ticket sales were to outside Australia. With the line-up we kept that
in mind. We wanted to be one of the best festivals in the world, not in
Australia. Of course we have Australians in mind, but we were looking
global.17
While EDM festivals provide local patrons with the opportunity

to experience music and DJs they perhaps would not otherwise get
to hear and see, their impact on local scenes can be detrimental for
those connected to other forms of dance music consumption, such as
nightclubbing. As Johnstone observes, ‘There has been a drop off in
weekly clubbing and clubbing in general. To have a consistent Tuesday
night [in Sydney] is impossible, and it didn’t used to be that way ten years
ago’.18 Commenting on the effect festivals have had on the scene, Jesse
Desenberg (Kid Kenobi) also highlights this decline in club culture, which
fights to compete against the high-profile, superstar, brand-like headliners
of the festival circuit:
[Festivals] definitely had a negative effect to begin with. When you have a
festival that’s got every big name you could possibly think of, it’s going to
make everything else look shit. It focuses on the fact it’s got to be about
the big name, as opposed to the music. I think that’s a big separation
between the older days and what is happening now. Today it tends to be
about the name or the brand of the artist as opposed to the music.19

17

18
Jesse Desenberg (Kid Kenobi), interview with the author (Sydney), 3 December 2014.
19
Trent Grimes describes the negative impact festivals can have on local
touring artists and performance opportunities:
Festivals definitely hurt [the DJ/club scene]. As someone who books

DJs, events, Ministry [of Sound] tours and all that sort of stuff, I have
every festival in front of me, so that when I’m plotting a tour, CD launch,
artist album launch, whatever it is, I will route the tour so it is as far
away [from the festival] as possible, because it’s going to hurt. There
are three weekends that are going to be pretty dire and unpredictable.
The weekend before, the weekend of and the weekend after . … So that’s
when we focus on regional territories, where the artist might not go for
the rest of the year.20
As well as this effect on the scheduling of DJ bookings, festivals also impact

upon the practice of DJing. With lineups featuring multiple DJs, festivals
rarely leave space for the four-hour DJ set. Short set times of an hour or
ninety minutes make festival DJing about instant gratification, separating it
from the musical journey associated with longer club sets. As Cunningham
explains, ‘[the DJ festival set] is not going to be an intense journey breaking
crazy, new, unheard music. It’s just going to be an hour set to have fun to, and
that’s what festival sets have always been about’.21 The cultural dominance
of festivals has altered perceptions of DJing, the shift to shorter set times
echoed by Fikentscher when he describes how in some contemporary DJing
‘the musical journey is at best truncated’ (2013: 132). The ebbs and flows
of this journey become replaced with the continuous peak generated by
the playing of one big track after another, Desenberg describing how at
festivals ‘you can get knocked down to forty-five minutes or an hour, and
that definitely forces people to throw in all the biggest tracks in a short space
of time’.22 Johnstone explores this in more detail, aligning the mode of DJ
performance at festivals with the aesthetics of live rock music:
Festivals have definitely had an impact [on DJing]. … It’s always been that
at festivals, even more so now, DJs have to cut their sets short because they
have to catch the audience’s attention quickly. What’s more interesting is
that a lot of them aren’t DJ sets. You’ve got someone like Avicii or Steve
Aoki, it’s just track after track, there’s no real mixing, there’s not really
a journey going on. Whereas someone like Carl Cox, he may shorten
his set to an hour for a festival but he’s still going to take the time to
put the tracks together in a way that’s interesting for the crowd. What’s
20
Trent Grimes, interview with the author (Sydney), 28 December 2010.
21
Katie Cunningham, interview with the author (Sydney), 4 December 2014.
22
Jesse Desenberg (Kid Kenobi), interview with the author (Sydney), 3 December 2014.
happened with these big acts playing these big festivals is essentially the
rock format applied to dance music.23
The discourse surrounding EDM in Australia has been dominated in recent

years by festivals and the impact of events such as Stereosonic. As seen in the
earlier discussion, this discourse runs across topics as diverse as participant
engagement with the scene, understandings of the local and the global, DJ
performances, government policy and commercialization, among many
others. Beyond its significance as an example of the contemporary cultural
phenomenon of super-sized EDM gatherings, Stereosonic also serves as
a case study of the socio-cultural convergence of government strategies,
commercial interests, local contexts and global flows.
Conclusion
Festivals dominate contemporary global EDM culture. Specific festival
brands command the marketplace in certain countries, with some expanding
into other territories (for example, EDC’s 2016 iterations in Japan, Mexico
and the United Kingdom). This culture of festivals has seen EDM audiences
shift from ‘clubbing’ to ‘festivalling’, from nighttime communities to
weekend societies. The mainstream festivals of EDM culture corral the
masses into well-organized, policed and regulated leisure environments.
Local scenes have become absorbed into transnational flows. Local DJs
have become subsumed under international headliners. Local audiences are
exposed to a multitude of global performers. For Fikentscher, this influence
of the global has been creeping into club culture since the 1990s ‘when so-
called superclubs, dance festivals and global DJ branding diminished the
role of geography in the relations between DJs and dancers’ (2013: 140).
Club DJ residencies have all but disappeared. The scale of festivals and their
annual occurrence ensures the relationship between DJ and crowd is one
of anonymity, in contrast to residencies where the DJ would get to know
the musical likes and dislikes of their regular patrons. For Fikentscher, this
anonymity is further emphasized by the multi-stage, multi-DJ festival (2013:
142). The popularity of festivals such as Stereosonic situates Australia’s
dance music scene, more so than ever before, within the global flows and
‘diffusion’ (Kong et al. 2006) of EDM.
This chapter has used the example of Australia’s Stereosonic to explore
some of the issues that arise when a festival dominates a scene. Grounded
in ethnographic research, participant-observation and interviews with key
industry personnel, the chapter has provided insights into and perspectives

23
on one of the world’s most successful EDM festivals. Some of the issues raised
during this discussion warrant further investigation, such as the impact of
festivals on DJing, programming and performativity, and the effect festivals
have on the nighttime economy. The recent upheavals in the Australian
music festival environment seem to suggest audiences are indeed ‘festivalled-
out’ (Gibson 2007: 79), at least in regard to super-sized, stadium-
based events. As Gibson observes, ‘Recently some mega-event promoters
have complained of over-saturation, undersupply of quality music acts
that can attract distant audiences willing to pay high ticket prices, and the
generally gloomy economic climate’ (2014: 152). For Richie McNeill, the
demise of some previously popular events is the result of audiences reacting
to a saturated festival scene:
When there’s an over-supply it gets to a point where there’s a correction.

The disappearance of Good Vibrations, Big Day Out, Parklife, Future
Music … it was inevitable. When people are spoilt for choice and there’s
an over-supply, they can pick and choose, and they pick the better
quality product. Future Music, Big Day Out, things like that didn’t
adapt and evolve and got incredibly expensive and didn’t look after the
punter. The market is still there. The fad stage is over, where it was new
and exciting, and now it’s just an established form of recreation that
will continue. Quality things like Laneway [Festival] and Stereosonic
that focus on what they do best, Splendour [in the Grass] and Falls
Festival, that look after the punter, that are culturally and creatively
great events, that focus on specific genres and styles of music, those
things will survive . … The festival market is healthy. People are spoilt
for choice.24
For Ant Celestino, this market correction may be driven by factors beyond
audience choice and control. He cites the burgeoning EDM scene in the
United States as providing more lucrative and convenient performance
options for DJs, thus increasing the cost and restricting the international
flow of available headline acts:
The agency cycle has got so out of control. You’ve got a lack of headliners
that are affordable. They want ridiculous money, and they want that
because they are making great money in Las Vegas. Why would I come
out [to Australia], all that hassle, a couple of weeks of touring and
everything that’s involved, when I can make that money in one weekend
in Vegas because the cycle there is in hyper-drive?25

24
Ant Celestino, interview with the author (Melbourne), 4 May 2016.

25
Stereosonic represents a key moment in the continuing evolution of

Australia’s dance music culture. While its scale, commercialism and cloning
strategy (Richards 2015: 252) disconnects the event from the local, and its
harnessing of a party model that promotes consumption and indulgence is
typically denigrated as providing a ‘formula dismissed as simply orgiastic’
(St John 2009a: 225), Stereosonic is an event that impacts significantly on
promotional practices, DJ techniques, media engagement and audience
consumption. Some of this impact may be construed as negative but
ultimately the diversity delivered by the festival and the opportunities
for exposure it provides shape Stereosonic as a meaningful platform for
consumption and production, for audience and performer. The festival
market may be changing but the festival experience will always be in
demand. Australian EDM audiences in the future may look for a smaller-
scale experience or may re-focus their energies on clubbing. But for the
moment it seems like this is the age of the branded mega festival for EDM
culture, where the global overrides the local and the dancefloor is at the
park, on the beach or in the stadium. In Australia, this age is embodied by
Stereosonic.
Postscript
Fifteen years ago Will Straw noted how ‘the life cycle of dance records
is notoriously short-lived, as deejays and club patrons tire of them and
demand novelty’ (2001: 169), while also fifteen years ago Kembrew McLeod
connected a ‘rapidly evolving’ electronic dance music culture to the notion
of ‘accelerated consumer culture’ (2001). Nothing has changed. Everything
in EDM, from styles and sounds to club nights and venues, moves quickly
through the popularity cycle. Festivals do not escape this velocity. While
this chapter was under review, Stereosonic ceased operations, its demise
seemingly a result of the financial woes of SFX. In February 2016, SFX
filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in the United States in order to
restructure its business. Totem OneLove immediately released a statement
declaring itself unaffected, as the bankruptcy proceedings only applied
to US corporate territory (Carbines 2016a). Yet a few weeks later the
company announced Stereosonic would be ‘taking a hiatus in 2016’ and
would return ‘bigger and better’ in 2017. Industry and media questioned
this, indicating 2015 was probably the last year of the festival (Moran
2016). This seems to have been confirmed by Totem OneLove being placed
in administration and closing its offices in May 2016. In our interview
Frank Cotela confirmed that Stereosonic had ended, while in an interview
with Mixmag, Richie McNeill indicated he intends to launch two new
festivals (Carbines 2016b). It has also been reported that McNeill, Cotela
and their three other partners in Stereosonic are still owed US$15 million
from SFX (Griffiths 2016).
All of this concludes the Stereosonic story in a rather confused
and corporately focused way, and somewhat obscures the significant
contribution the festival made in establishing Australia as a key market
in global electronic dance music culture. It seems that Australia has, for
the moment, moved out of the age of the branded mega EDM festival
(even if such events remain popular elsewhere). Yet, over a period of nine
years, Stereosonic demonstrated the significance of the festival format to
a generation of electronic dance music fans seeking their own weekend
society. While the festival format continues to provide a frame for EDM
events in Australia, it is unlikely that something will ever match the scale
and popularity of Stereosonic.
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CHAPTER THREE
Searching for a Cultural Home:

Asian American Youth in
the EDM Festival Scene
Judy Park
This chapter investigates the recent proliferation of Asian American

participants in EDM festivals with a particular focus on those organized by
Insomniac Events in Southern California, such as Electric Daisy Carnival1
and the Wonderland series. Insomniac is unique among organizers of large
EDM festivals in this region, such as HARD Events, as it appears to have
fully embraced the historical rave culture and ideology of PLUR (Peace,
Love, Unity and Respect). Insomniac’s events not only emphasize a magical
and utopian ambience with themes incorporating Alice in Wonderland and
the Snow Queen, but Insomniac founder Pasquale Rotella has explicitly
referred to PLUR in his social media accounts and has actively encouraged
attendees to wear kandies,2 a defining symbol of PLUR in contemporary
This chapter was previously published in Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music
Culture in May 2015. Dancecult permits the reproduction of this material by Bloomsbury in
this volume. Executive Editor of Dancecult, Graham St John.
1
Although Electric Daisy Carnival occurs in Las Vegas, I include the event as part of the EDM
festival scene in Southern California given its origins in the Greater Los Angeles region and the
significant participation from residents of Southern California, according to my interviewees.
2
Kandies are bracelets, necklaces or other accessories made of neon beads that my interviewees
believed are a defining symbol of PLUR and ‘rave culture’ in the contemporary EDM festival
scene. Kandies are frequently exchanged between two participants that have developed a
connection at a festival, following a ritualized handshake simulating each component of PLUR.
EDM festival culture (Rotella 2014; Sachs 2014). By propagating an ethos of

PLUR, Insomniac’s events promise a space where anyone, regardless of race,
class, gender or sexuality, can experience cultural belonging and acceptance.
Meanwhile, as Insomniac’s festivals continue to become increasingly massive
and commercialized, these events have attracted significant participation
from groups beyond the middle-class white participants typically associated
with the EDM festival scene. This newfound diversity of participants tests
the egalitarian ethos of PLUR and provides an opportunity to examine how
various groups negotiate their subjectivities in relation to the contemporary
EDM festival scene.
This chapter is a preliminary study of this tension between the massive
contemporary EDM festival scene and the ideology of PLUR, which purports
that EDM festivals are free from identity-based boundaries or inequalities.
Using an interview-based methodology paired with participant observation,
I argue that the status of Asian American youth as ‘perpetual foreigners’ and
subsequent desire for cultural belonging have motivated their participation in
EDM festivals. Nevertheless, the Asian American participants I interviewed
defined notions of belonging, authenticity and subcultural capital in the
EDM festival scene in relation to suburban middle-class whiteness and
in opposition to urban hip-hop blackness. These experiences further
perpetuated dominant understandings of race and the normalization of
whiteness among my informants.3
EDM festivals are a meaningful place to analyse identity and belonging,
as their roots can be traced back to the historical rave scene providing
marginalized groups with alternative spaces of transgression. House music
first developed in predominantly gay black clubs in Chicago in the 1980s,
which provided a refuge, especially for clubgoers facing the dual oppression
of racism and homophobia (Silcott 1999: 22). Soon, house music became
popular in the UK after several British DJs encountered the music in the
open-air disco scene of Ibiza in the summer of 1988, often referred to
as the ‘Summer of Love’. These DJs sought to replicate this ‘hippie-ish,
under-the-stars, beautiful open vibe’, together with variations of house
music and the euphoric effects of the drug ecstasy also encountered in
Ibiza, in London (Silcott 1999: 31). Taking place in clubs, warehouses and
even fitness centers, these dance parties came to be called ‘raves’. Although
the British rave scene was far removed from Chicago house, it similarly
provided a space of transgression – in this case, for British youth to escape
from the cultural repression and economic realities associated with the
Thatcher era.
3
I define normalization of whiteness as the process in which whiteness has become ‘the
unacknowledged norm [and] the location from which others are defined and judged’ (Andersen
2003: 28).
SEARCHING FOR A CULTURAL HOME 71
The concept of raves quickly spread beyond the UK and returned to the
United States, where the concept of PLUR flourished in various locations,
but particularly in California where the legacies of the 1960s counterculture
persisted. Importantly, most of these scenes came to be identified with
middle-class white youth with house music’s connection to the Chicago gay
black scene largely distanced. This whitening of the scene was facilitated
by a moral panic and news coverage of white middle-class youth partaking
in excessive drug use in unlicensed dance parties. By the early 2000s,
police crackdowns had largely corralled the rave scene into conventional
nightclubs and the live event industry. The latter grew steadily and began
to gain notable traction in the late 2000s. In 2010, Insomniac’s Electric
Daisy Carnival (EDC) attracted wide news attention due to a fifteen-year-
old female attendant dying from overdose of ecstasy, which caused the city
of Los Angeles to place a moratorium on all remaining events for the year.
Ironically, my interviewees believed that the news served as publicity for
EDC, which moved to Las Vegas in 2011 as a three-day festival attracting a
record of more than 230,000 participants.
Despite rave’s roots in providing a space of belonging and acceptance for
marginalized groups, few scholars have focused on nonwhite participants’
negotiations of race or class in either the rave or EDM festival scenes. In fact,
there seems to exist a clear tension between scholars’ claims that raves erase
identity-based boundaries and stereotypes, and their lack of attention to
how nonwhite participants negotiate this ‘erasure’. Most ethnographic
studies have focused on ways raves provide white middle-class participants
with socially distinct identifications and an alternative space of peace, love,
unity and respect (Thornton 1996; Collin 1997; Reynolds 1998; Hutson
2000; Measham, Parker and Aldridge 2001; Hill 2002). Notable exceptions
include Fikentscher (2000) and Buckland (2002), although my research
provides more recent analysis, focusing specifically on Asian American
participants, a largely overlooked group in EDM cultural studies.
Therefore, my research makes two key contributions. First, it provides
a much-needed study of the contemporary EDM festival scene focusing
on how nonwhite participants negotiate their subjectivities in relation to
the scene. In particular, the dominant depiction of Asian Americans as
‘honorary whites’ offers a unique opportunity to question the extent to
which Asian American participation reinforces, obfuscates or undermines
the middle-class whiteness of EDM festivals. Second, my research seeks to
increase the visibility of Asian American youth and their engagements with
popular culture, which has largely been neglected in ethnographic research
and theory.4 As Lee and Zhou note, ‘Asian American youth as a group have
4
See Maira (2002) for an important exception and Lee and Zhou (2004) for a more general
discussion of Asian American youth studies.
been almost entirely omitted from research on youth and youth culture in
the U.S.’ (2004: 9). I argue that the academic negligence of the involvement
of Asian American youth in popular culture further perpetuates their status
as ‘perpetual foreigners’.
After discussing my research methodology, I trace the history of dominant
white depictions of Asian Americans, which have consistently portrayed
Asian Americans as perpetual foreigners, inassimilable to the white American
culture. Then, I analyse how the Asian American youth I interviewed have
turned to the EDM festival scene for its promise of an egalitarian utopia,
exemplified by the ethos of PLUR, particularly in Insomniac’s events. Finally,
I argue that despite the rhetoric of racelessness, EDM festivals are signified
by middle-class whiteness defined against lower-class hip-hop blackness,
which my interviewees imagined to be urban lifestyles full of crime and
gang activity.
Researching race in EDM festivals

Most of my data consist of in-depth interviews with Asian American
EDM festival participants in Southern California, paired with contextual
information from participant-observation of the 2014 White Wonderland
organized by Insomniac. Over the course of eight months, from May through
December 2013, I conducted thirty-eight interviews with youth who self-
identified as Asian American and have attended at least three EDM festivals
in Southern California, although thirty-one interviewees have attended
more than eight. I interviewed twenty-one males and seventeen females. All
interviewees were above the age of eighteen and the average age was twenty-
three. I used the snowball sampling method by first asking my high school
and college networks in Southern California and then my interviewees for
introductions to Asian American EDM festival participants. I used the open-
ended and semi-structured interview method, as this study focuses on Asian
American youth’s subjective understandings of identity and belonging. My
interviews ranged from half an hour to an hour and a half.
I allowed interviewees to self-identify as Asian American rather than
imposing a formal definition because my research focuses on Asian American-
ness as a cultural identity – an individual’s sense of belonging within a group
based on his or her understanding of the group’s culture. This decision relies
on the assumption that racial categories such as Asian Americans are social
constructions that are historically contingent and unstable in their boundaries.
As a result, I interviewed three individuals who identified as Asian American
and as half-Asian or multiracial. The majority of interviewees, thirty-three
of the thirty-eight, ethnically identified as Chinese, Taiwanese, Korean, or
Vietnamese, which, according to my informants, reflects the popularity of
EDM festivals among these ethnic groups. Thus, it is important to note
that the Asian American cultural identity under discussion in this chapter
is based on the specific understandings and experiences of my informants

from limited ethnic groups, rather than a universal definition. Based on my
interviews, I would synthesize their understanding of Asian American-ness
to be associated with middle-class East Asian (more specifically Chinese,
Taiwanese and Korean) and Vietnamese youth living in suburban Southern
California. Nevertheless, informants of other ethnicities (South Asian,
Filipino, Japanese and multiracial) self-identified with the Asian American
classification largely through their identifications within East Asian or
Vietnamese social groups. Though I do not argue that the diverse narratives
and experiences of various ethnicities within East Asian, South Asian and
Southeast Asian groups can be collapsed into one category, I suggest that
the broader ‘Asian American’ group is the most relevant to discussions of
race in the EDM festival scene. Most of my interviewees categorized racial
groups in the scene as whites, blacks, Latinos and Asian Americans, defining
Asian Americans as inclusive of individuals from East Asian, South Asian
and Southeast Asian groups.
I paired these interviews with participant observation at six EDM events
including the 2013 White Wonderland, an annual New Year’s Eve music
festival organized by Insomniac. My experiences at White Wonderland
helped contextualize my interviewees’ experiences and support my interview
findings. I experienced firsthand the magical and fantastical production
by Insomniac, including white pillars surrounding the stage, snowflakes
and chandeliers hanging from the ceiling and rays of laser light covering
every corner of the dancefloor. As noted by several interviewees that ‘White
Wonderland has the most Asians’ due to its location in Orange County,
with its large Asian American population, I found that more than half the
participants were Asian American. Furthermore, most of the Asian American
participants I saw appeared to arrive in predominantly Asian American
groups without significant interaction with those outside their groups. My
lack of direct exposure to music festivals beyond White Wonderland serves
as a limitation of my study. Nevertheless, it is important to note that my
research question focuses on racial ideologies and their interplay with the
ideologies of the EDM festival scene rather than racial performance. I focused
my initial research on interviews as they allowed me to analyse how these
ideologies influenced Asian American participants’ understandings of their
experiences in the EDM festival scene and of their Asian American identities.
I plan to conduct further ethnographic research to support the preliminary
findings presented in this chapter.
Researcher positionality
Another limitation of my study is the extent to which my position as a
researcher influenced interviewee responses. I am not an insider to the scene,
as I did not listen to EDM extensively and had never attended a festival before
I began my research. I also never experienced the influence of drugs, which

various scholars (Collin 1997; Reynolds 1998; Hutson 2000; McCall 2001)
and many of my interviewees believe are an important aspect of the EDM
festival culture. On the other hand, my status as an outsider to the scene
allowed me to ask festival participants a wide range of questions relating to
their observations of other participants, as well as their perspectives on the
PLUR-based culture, drug use, attire and sexual expressions.
Although I am an outsider to the scene, my interviewees seemed to
consider me an insider in other ways.5 Given that I am an Asian American
young woman from Southern California, my interviewees seemed excited
to share relatable experiences ranging from the high schools they attended
to the Asian market where they first heard trance music. In particular, my
young age seemed to put interviewees at notable ease, as indicated by their
use of slang and profanity, candid discussions of their sexual or illegal
experiences and expressions of internalized stereotypes of race and class
that have become critical to my analysis. In particular, my interviewees
seemed to be very comfortable sharing their internalized stereotypes
of Asian Americans and even suggested that I would know about the
academic pressures or strict parents because I was also Asian American.
On the other hand, my identity as a heterosexual woman seemed to
limit some interviewees’ responses when discussing topics of gender and
sexuality. Some instances, however, such as when my male interviewees
would noticeably hesitate or filter their perspectives on female participants,
served as powerful moments for analysis.
Perpetual foreigners without a cultural home

In this section, I argue that despite the seemingly contradictory nature
of various dominant portrayals of Asian Americans, such as the ‘yellow
peril’ and ‘model minority’, Asian Americans are consistently portrayed
as ‘perpetual foreigners’ who are unassimilable to the dominant white
American culture. These depictions have created a complex relationship
between Asian Americans and the mainstream American culture. Not only
do these ‘controlling images’ (Hill Collins 2000) circulate through popular
culture and media, but they have also largely excluded Asian Americans
in popular culture and media. Although whites have occasionally depicted
Asian Americans with similar characteristics as middle-class whites when it
serves their interests to do so, the persistent portrayal of Asian Americans
as perpetual foreigners ultimately denies Asian Americans access to the
privileges of middle-class whiteness.
5
See Hill Collins (1986) for a more thorough discussion of the insider and outsider distinction.
From ‘Yellow Peril’ to ‘Model Minority’

Though dominant portrayals of Asian Americans have shifted from the
‘yellow peril’ in the late 1800s to the ‘model minority’ in the 1960s, this
transition was initiated by whites to advance white interests. The first
dominant depiction of Asian Americans, particularly Chinese immigrants to
the West Coast in the late nineteenth century, was their portrayal as foreign
threats to the American nation and family. Often referred to as the ‘yellow
peril’, white Americans’ fear of this threat was framed not only in racialized
imperialist terms of ‘earlier fantasies of exotic but distant Asia’, but also in
gendered terms of Chinese Americans jeopardizing traditional white gender
roles (Lee 1999: 9). Chinese American men were depicted as cheap ‘coolie
laborers’ who stole jobs from white male labourers and undermined the
white man’s duties to his family. Chinese American women were depicted
as prostitutes who threatened the ‘purity’ of white womanhood (Lee 1999:
9–10). These fears eventually culminated to the 1875 Page Act: the first
federal restrictive immigration law that prohibited the entry of ‘undesirable’
immigrants from Asia, particularly those perceived likely to become forced
labourers or prostitutes.
Popular representations of Asian Americans shifted from the undesirable
coolie labourers and prostitutes in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries to the ‘model minority’ in the 1960s, ‘at the peak of the civil
rights and ethnic consciousness movements’ (Lee and Zhou 2004: 17).
In this context, whites used depictions of socioeconomically successful
Asian Americans to deny the existence of racial inequalities and to blame
other nonwhite groups, such as blacks and Latinos, for being culturally
unfit or unwilling to attain success (Lee 1996, 2005). Various scholars have
critiqued this stereotyping for obfuscating racial inequalities, hindering
nonwhite solidarity and alienating Asian Americans who do not fit into the
successful ‘model minority’ mold. Some scholars, however, have overlooked
the interrelated link between depictions of Asian Americans as the ‘model
minority’ and the ‘yellow peril’. For example, Lee and Zhou argue that the
model minority stereotype ‘marked a significant departure from the portrayal
of Asian Americans as aliens and foreigners’ (2004: 17). Nevertheless, I am
sympathetic with the view that ‘the model minority and the yellow peril
are actually continuous images’ in that both images have depicted Asian
Americans as perpetual foreigners who could be easily stereotyped as exotic
creatures in order to advance white interests (Kibria 2002: 132).6 Despite
the ‘model minority’ myth characterizing Asian Americans with seemingly
positive and white-like qualities such as being hardworking, disciplined and
6
Also see Yu (2001) and Lee (2005).
success-oriented, it also suggests that Asian Americans are ultimately unlike

whites in that they are too hardworking, disciplined and success-oriented,
or that they possess only these qualities. Both the ‘model minority’ myth
and the ‘yellow peril’ alienated Asian Americans as uninvited guests to the
United States who threatened the economic security of whites.
Representations in popular culture and music

The link between the ‘model minority’ myth and the ‘perpetual foreigner’
archetype is particularly pronounced when discussing representations
of Asian Americans in popular culture. Media depictions have powerful
implications by serving as ‘controlling images’ that disseminate dominant
ideas about marginalized groups that often justify their own oppressions
(Hill Collins 2000). Not only is popular mediation of Asians and Asian
Americans scant, but even the few existing images are limited in the
complexities of their representation: the overly sexualized ‘Lotus Blossom
Baby (a.k.a. China Doll, Geisha Girls, shy Polynesian beauty, et al.) [or] the
Dragon Lady (Fu Manchu’s various female relations, prostitutes, devious
madams)’ for Asian women and the desexualized ‘egghead/wimp, or … the
kung fu master/ninja/samurai’ for Asian men (Fung 2005: 237).
In popular music, Asian Americans lack not only representation in the
number of artists, producers and DJs, but also a mainstream sound or
scene that they can call their own (Lee and Zhou 2004: 19). Granted that
South Asian bhangra music has experienced popularity in the United States
and some incorporation into popular music (Maira 2002), East Asians
and Southeast Asians, who composed most of my interviewees, have not
experienced as much success.7 For example, my interviewees noted that East
Asian American artists seem to experience difficulty gaining sustainable
success with white audiences, with the exception of ‘one-hit wonders like
“Gangnam Style” or “Like a G6”’.8
This exclusion of Asian Americans in popular music reflects
both the ‘model minority’ and ‘perpetual foreigner’ stereotypes. The
‘model minority’ myth suggests that Asian Americans prioritize stable
socioeconomic success over cultural and political engagements and that
they lack the creativity necessary to become successful artists (Yu 2001:
189). The ‘perpetual foreigner’ stereotype largely prevents white audiences
7
I refer to ‘South Asian’ and ‘East Asian’ American artists together here, not because I do not
acknowledge the important distinctions in their histories and cultures, but because dominant
American cultures have largely collapsed the two groups into the category of ‘Asian Americans’.
8
References to Korean pop singer Psy’s song ‘Gangnam Style’, which became the most watched
video on YouTube in 2012 and Asian American hip-hop group Far East Movement’s ‘Like a G6’,
which achieved number one on the US Billboard Hot 100 for two weeks in November 2010.
from considering Asian American artists as American artists in the first

place. In turn, the lack of Asian American representation in popular music
further perpetuates the dominant notion that they are unassimilable to
American culture. As Robert Lee argues, ‘the “common understanding”
of the Oriental as racialized alien … originates in the realm of popular
culture, where struggles over who is or who can become a “real American”
take place’ (1998: 5). I argue that the recently popularized EDM festival
scene has also become a valuable place to frame discussions of who can
belong as a ‘real American’. As revealed throughout my interviews with
Asian American participants, the scene perpetuates the myth that it is an
egalitarian utopia while falling short of true racial equality and acceptance.
This myth serves to further the dominant obliteration and denial of racial
inequality in the United States today.
Belonging through escape

In this section, I analyse how my interviewees’ participation in the EDM
festival scene relates to their Asian American identities and desire for cultural
belonging. I argue that these discussions reflect a paradoxical understanding
of the relationship between their Asian American identities and their
participation in the scene. My interviewees claim that the EDM festival scene
provides Asian American participants with access to mainstream American
culture, yet the scene also represents experiences they consider antithetical
to their Asian American backgrounds.
Searching for belonging

The common thread throughout the history of the rave scene, despite all of
its reappropriations, relocations and resurgences, is that raves represented
spaces of belonging and acceptance to participants who have felt socially
marginalized. The focus and definition of this marginalization has shifted
in the United States, particularly as rave culture, originating in gay black
communities, has been reappropriated by middle-class white youth who
identified themselves as social outcasts. In contemporary EDM festivals,
particularly those organized by Insomniac, this promise of belonging and
acceptance persists through the ideology of PLUR. Many participants believe
PLUR connects the EDM festival scene historical rave culture, or rather, their
utopian imaginations of this culture. In fact, the majority of my informants
used the word ‘rave’ interchangeably with an ‘EDM festival’ despite the
clear differences in scale, production and culture of these two scenes.
As EDM festivals have grown increasingly massive and its participant base
increasingly diverse, the juxtaposition between the ethos of racial inclusion
symbolized by PLUR and the racialized groupings of participants creates a

unique opportunity to analyse how nonwhite participants negotiate their
subjectivities in relation to scene.
Among my key questions to interviewees was why they believed Asian
American participants were drawn to the EDM festival scene. A surprisingly
high number of responses invoked the desire of Asian American youth for
cultural belonging and the rave scene’s historical function of providing a
welcoming space for society’s outcasts. Elise,9 a twenty-two-year-old Korean
American, grew up in a predominantly Asian American community where
more than 80 per cent of the students at her high school were Asian American.
In response to my inquiry, she stated, ‘I feel like a lot of Asians feel the
need to fit in just because, you know, we are from a different country’. By
asserting that ‘a lot of Asians … are from a different country’, even when she
herself was born in the United States, Elise seems to have internalized the
dominant depiction of Asian Americans as perpetual foreigners who ‘feel the
need to fit in’. Later in the interview, she connects this desire for belonging
with the PLUR-based culture of EDM festivals:
I think a lot of people that are into electronic music tend to be like
introverted … like not the most popular people at school and stuff, so I
feel like they feel accepted when they go [to EDM festivals] cause they’re
not feeling judged or anything … . It’s easy for them to make friends there,
so I think that’s what appeals to a lot of Asians.
Elise implicitly draws the parallel between Asian American youth and the
introverted and unpopular white youth associated with the historical rave
scene, suggesting that both groups seek a cultural scene that provides them
with an alternative reality of belonging and acceptance.
Greg, a twenty-one-year-old Chinese American, echoed this belief that
EDM festivals provide a space for Asian Americans to experience belonging,
although his experiences were different than Elise’s in that he grew up in a
predominantly upper-middle-class white neighbourhood in Ventura County.
Noting that he has ‘personally felt racial discrimination’ in his life, Greg
stated that the EDM festival scene provided him and other Asian Americans
with a sense of belonging away from the dominance of the popular white
kids in school:
At least all or most of the Asian Americans that I’ve seen growing up
in high school or middle school, they always wanted like a sense of
belonging, to belong to something, whether they found like electronic
music or something … For the most part, Asians, they’re always like, ‘Oh,
9
All interviewee names are pseudonyms throughout the chapter.
he’s probably all weak, can’t protect himself.’ He’s always picked on so
it’s like to belong, like having a sense of family.
This imagery of ‘family’ recurs regularly in the EDM festival scene and
seems to be another legacy of the historical rave scene’s communal and
uniting power. Many interviewees called the groups with whom they
attend EDM festivals, ‘rave families’ and the people who first introduced
them to the scene, ‘rave moms’ and ‘rave dads’. My interviewees’ use of
the metaphor that a ‘rave’ is one big family suggests that they feel a deep
connection with other participants who provide protection from the social
dominance or bullying of the outside world. Yet, as I argue throughout the
chapter, this metaphor of the family paints an overly idealistic picture of the
contemporary EDM festival scene that is divided along racial and class lines.
Following trends
In addition to the desire to find belonging, my informants also expressed
a closely related belief that Asian American participants attended EDM
festivals to ‘follow a trend’. Charles, a twenty-two-year-old Vietnamese
American, stated that Asian American youth began attending EDM festivals
‘because it’s a fad. Yeah, I feel like Asian American culture, like, they’re
really heavily influenced by trends and fads, you know, what’s in’. When I
asked Charles why he believes that the ‘Asian American culture’ is heavily
influenced by fads, he replied, ‘I have no idea. It’s always been like that as
far as I’ve seen, like when a new big restaurant comes out or when boba10
came out … It’s like the sense of being included, you know?’ Several other
interviewees made similarly broad claims that Asian Americans are trendier
than other racial groups. These perceptions highlighted these interviewees’
beliefs that Asian American youth participated in EDM festivals to fulfil
their desire for belonging.
A question that emerged from these conversations was whether Asian
American participants believed that these trends, including EDM festivals,
were started by whites or by other Asian Americans. The responses were
divided. Elise provided a nuanced answer to this question, stating that ‘a
raver identity is like something that makes you different from that average
American, but at the same time … kinda ties you to the other Asians’. In other
words, Elise suggests that Asian American participation in EDM festivals
serves the dual purpose of adopting the ‘raver identity’, which they considered
to be alternative to the mainstream and developing connections with other
10
Boba is a Taiwanese tea-based drink with chewy tapioca balls that several interviewees
claimed ‘blew up’ in Asian American communities several years ago.
Asian American participants. A useful concept with which to analyse this

phenomenon is subcultural capital, which Sarah Thornton (1996) defines
as the status of ‘hipness’, composed of cultural knowledge and commodities
that participants of ‘subcultures’ adopt in order to distinguish themselves
from the mainstream culture and other subcultures. In other words, Elise
seems to believe that Asian American participants reacted to their need to
‘fit in’ to mainstream white America by ‘standing out’, especially as they
do not have access to dominant means of achieving popularity. Classifying
the massive and commoditized EDM festival scene as a ‘subculture’ may
be closer to the participants’ imaginations than reality, yet my interviewees
firmly believed that Asian American participants adopted the unique ‘raver
identity’ to obtain a status of ‘hipness’, as well as to become connected to
other Asian American youth in the scene.
Escaping from ‘Asian American identities’

Despite claiming that EDM festivals provide a sense of belonging for Asian
Americans, my informants paradoxically believed that EDM festivals also
provide an escape from their Asian American identities. When I asked Irene,
a twenty-one-year-old Taiwanese American, if she thought her experiences
as an Asian American motivated her decision to attend EDM festivals, Irene
responded that ‘parental restrictions’, which have been a ‘big part of [her]
life’, motivated her participation. Invoking dominant depictions of Asian
Americans as the model minority, Irene suggests that ‘parental restrictions’
are an essential part of her understanding of the Asian American identity:
I think at raves, there’s a contrast from being Asian, because, you know,
it’s not like that strict, restraining curfew, being home by ten … . Like
Asians, you can’t really do that and get kicked out of the house, that sort
of thing? So yeah, it’s just like, I think because it’s such a stark contrast
from being an Asian. It’s the freedom (emphasis added).
Irene considers her participation in EDM festivals to be antithetical to ‘being

an Asian’ and suggests that EDM festivals open up the opportunity to free
herself from her Asian American identity. Several interviewees also noted
that EDM festivals provided them with the freedom and escape from strict
parents, which they understood to be central to their identities as Asian
Americans and parallels dominant white depictions of Asian Americans as
the model minority.
Anthony, a twenty-one-year-old Vietnamese American, takes this idea of
escaping from Asian American-ness further to argue that Asian American
participants, including himself, have turned to EDM festivals in order to
assimilate into whiteness, in contrast to Elise’s earlier statement that Asian
Americans became connected to each other through their participation.

Although Anthony, like Elise, went to a predominantly Asian American
high school, he notes that the most popular kids in school were white.
He first heard about EDM festivals from several of these ‘popular’ white
girls, who he said he was ‘obsessed with’ and ‘wanted to be their friends’.
He further stated, ‘Basically, that’s why I was trying to hang out with them
and trying to like assimilate into their whole white culture’. When Anthony
saw some of these girls posting about an upcoming EDM festival on their
social media accounts, he states, ‘I was so intrigued and I wanted to be
popular and I wanted to be cool, so I started like looking into it’. It was
only because of his desire of wanting to become as popular as these white
girls and ‘assimilate into white culture’ that he first began attending EDM
festivals. Anthony extrapolates from his experiences to conclude, ‘Asians
are trying to assimilate and copy white people, so they try to do the same
thing’. Anthony suggests that even though he attends EDM festivals with
predominantly Asian American groups, he is entering a space that signifies a
type of whiteness that he perceives to be ‘cool’ and seeks to adopt.
Unmasking the middle-class whiteness of EDM

festivals
In this section, I evaluate the ideological myth that the PLUR-based EDM
festival culture is equally welcoming to and accepting of all identities. I argue
that the EDM festival culture is dominated by middle-class whiteness, as
whites predominantly control ideologies of authenticity and belonging within
the scene. It is important to note that I do not base my argument merely
on the racial demographics of EDM festival participants. Instead, I seek
to highlight the racialization of EDM festivals, or the process of ascribing
a race to the scene, by analysing which groups control and represent the
‘raver identity’ related to the EDM festival culture. First, I discuss how
my informants negotiate the idea that most of the ‘main characters’ of
EDM festivals, including event producers, DJs and participants, are white
despite the EDM festival’s claims of being raceless spaces. Then, I argue
that authenticity and belonging in the EDM festival scene are represented
and dominated by middle-class whiteness. Lastly, I demonstrate how my
informants understand EDM festival culture as being antithetical to what
they believed to be urban black hip-hop culture.
I wish to highlight my interviewees’ practice of ‘strategic ignorance’, which
Alison Bailey (2007: 88) defines as ‘a form of knowing that uses dominant
misconceptions as a basis for active creative responses to oppression’. In other
words, instead of simply accepting or denying dominant white depictions
of Asian Americans, Asian Americans may resist creatively by adhering to
certain depictions when it serves their interests to do so. For instance, Asian
Americans’ internalization of their status as the model minority and its
association with work ethic and ambition can be useful for improving their
educational and vocational prospects. It allows them to benefit from their
relatively closer association with middle-class whiteness and to disidentify
themselves from the oppressions of other nonwhite groups. In the context
of the EDM festival scene, strategic ignorance allows Asian American youth
to justify their participation in a scene dominated by middle-class whiteness
through their firm belief in the cultural similarities between whites and Asian
Americans, as well as culturally racist understandings of other nonwhite
groups. This section also highlights my informants’ agency amid the dominant
racial structures and ideologies, as well as their statuses as ‘oppressed-
resisting subjects’, simultaneously oppressed, resisting their oppression and
oppressing other groups through cultural racism (Bailey 2007: 83).
‘White people are still the main characters’

Although most of my interviewees adhered to the ideology of PLUR to
claim that they do not associate EDM festivals with any particular race or
ethnicity, a few individuals explicitly noted the scene’s white dominance.
When asked if she associates EDM festival culture with a racial group, Jen,
a twenty-year-old Taiwanese American, stated, ‘even though I always go
with Asian Americans, I would still say I think of white people for raves.
The reason is because when all those events put up photos, it’s always
like white people photos. Like white people are still generally the main
characters … Attendees, DJs are generally white people’. Jen suggests that
media images serve a powerful role in ascribing whiteness to the EDM
festival scene for both participants and outsiders, regardless of whether
the images accurately represent the firsthand experiences of participants.
These images similarly echo the news coverage of the American rave scene
in the 1990s, which triggered the moral panic around middle-class white
youth excessively using drugs and made middle-class white youth the main
characters despite other racial groups participating in the scene.
Annie, a twenty-year-old Taiwanese American who attended the same
international high school as Jen in Taiwan, echoed a similar belief in the
dominant whiteness the EDM festival scene. When asked why she thinks
EDM festivals appeal to Asian American youth, Annie responded, ‘I feel like
the type of Asians they attract are Asians who are more Westernized … I
don’t wanna use this word, but I definitely don’t see many “fobby”11 Asians
A fob (fresh off the boat) is a colloquial term used to describe an immigrant, typically Asian
11
American, who is perceived not to have assimilated into the American culture, language and
behaviour.
at raves at all’. Annie’s statement reflects a binary understanding of Asian

Americans as the ‘Westernized Asians’ and ‘fobby Asians’, distinguished by
their abilities to assimilate into white cultures. In fact, Annie seems to use
the word ‘Westernized’ as a euphemism for culturally white. When pressed
further about why there are not as many black or Latino participants at
EDM festivals who may be just as ‘Westernized’ as Asian American youth,
Annie responded hesitantly, ‘Oh yeah, hm … I don’t know, I feel like, I feel
like when you, um, listen to hip-hop and rap and stuff, like the image of
black people is just so strong and I feel like that’s kinda the same thing
for EDM. Like for EDM, the image of white people is very strong so…’
This statement not only places hip-hop blackness and EDM whiteness as
polar opposites of each other, but it also implies that the aforementioned
‘Westernized Asians’ are better able to identify with the whiteness of the
EDM festival scene than black or Latino youth, a practice of strategic
ignorance that places Asian Americans higher on the racial totem pole than
other nonwhite groups.
Although Jen and Annie were two of the few interviewees who
explicitly noted the association of EDM festivals with whiteness, my other
interviewees’ discussions revealed that the ‘main characters’ in the scene
are dominated by whites. Although there are no official statistics on the
demographics of popular DJs, a public poll hosted by DJ Mag (2013), a
popular magazine dedicated to dance music, shows that sixteen out of the
top twenty DJs are white. At the 2013 White Wonderland, all the go-go
dancers and five of the six DJs were white – the sixth DJ was Laidback
Luke, a multiracial Filipino-Dutch DJ. Laidback Luke was one of a handful
of nonwhite DJs that my interviewees listed when I asked the question why
it seems that most famous DJs seem to be white. Other Asian American
DJs they listed included Steve Aoki, Shogun and Ken Loi, while they also
pointed to Afrojack as another prominent nonwhite DJ. Nonetheless, the
aspect of these discussions important for my analysis was not the actual
proportion of successful DJs who are nonwhite but rather the ways in
which my interviewees reacted to this question and what these reactions
revealed about their understandings of race in the scene. A great number
of interviewees were surprised at the question and noted they had never
thought about the race of EDM DJs, uttering comments such as ‘now that
I think about it, a lot of DJs are white…’. Others were quick to justify
this phenomenon and thereby uphold the belief that the EDM festival scene
is equally accessible to all races – they noted that the music originated in
Europe or turned to reasons why nonwhite groups are not pursuing DJ
careers. The latter point relied on dominant racial stereotypes such as that
Asian Americans value financial stability and lack creativity, while blacks
relate better to hip-hop lyrics focused on urban lower-class lifestyles.
In fact, one interviewee pursuing a career as a DJ claimed, ‘Actually [my
Asian American identity] might work to my advantage because there are so
little … It’s like Jeremy Lin, you know?’ These responses reflected two ways
in which dominant racial ideologies were infused with the historical rave
ideology adopted by the EDM festival scene; the normalization of whiteness
and the denial of racism by invoking culturally based arguments.
Controlling authenticity, belonging and subcultural

capital
The normalization of whiteness and denial of racism were also persistent
in discussions of the dominant participants in the scene. In the context of
an accelerated commercialization of the EDM festival scene in the last few
years, informants described a tension between the ‘kandi ravers’ – the most
authentic and original attendees – and the ‘frat bros’ – the newcomers who
were ruining the PLUR-based culture through their disrespectful behaviour.
Although they did not always make this connection explicit, a closer analysis
reveals that both these groups signify different forms of middle-class
whiteness. In analysing the different forms of whiteness, I adopt Andersen’s
belief that scholars ought to pay particular attention to the ‘differentiation
among whites’ rather than ‘using whiteness as a monolithic category’ (2003:
28). My interviewees identified kandi ravers as white social outcasts from
middle-class suburban high schools in surrounding regions. On the other
hand, they identified the frat bros as the popular white kids who moved on to
participate in the Greek fraternity systems at nearby universities. Although
frat bros may more closely approximate popular understandings of middle-
class whiteness, signified by their representations of financial, social and
cultural capital,12 both frat bros and kandi ravers represent forms of middle-
class whiteness differentiated by levels of mainstream social acceptance.
When describing the types of participants that she observes at EDM
festivals, Vicky, a twenty-year-old Korean American, stated, ‘I think half of
the people that went were like the hardcore rave people, who, when you first
think of rave people, the weird white people who wear a lot of kandi and
they’re very eccentric and … they just kinda look like druggies’. Although
Vicky was explicit in describing the whiteness of the kandi ravers, most
interviewees only noted that kandi ravers tended to be white when prompted
about their race, suggesting the normalization of whiteness in discussing the
most authentic participants in the scene. My informants expressed complex
relationships with the kandi ravers, who were considered to be ‘losers’ in
mainstream culture yet also represented the most authentic ravers with
12
I use social capital to mean one’s social networks that have value, and cultural capital to
mean one’s non-financial social assets, such as education, intellect, speech or dress, which can
increase one’s opportunities or life chances. See Bourdieu (1986).
access to the subcultural capital within the EDM festival scene. Although my
informants did not want to be fully identified as kandi ravers, they seemed
to desire partial identification in order to be regarded as authentic ‘ravers’,
with the status of ‘hipness’ discussed in previous sections. This partial
identification was pronounced in the resentment shared with kandi ravers
towards the frat bros, who were invading the scene and jeopardizing the
subcultural capital of EDM festivals through their mainstream tendencies.
Vicky described the other ‘half’ of the attendees at EDM festivals as ‘frat
bros and sorority girls’, who have recently entered the scene to party, take
drugs and find sexual partners. My informants’ views of the frat bros and
sorority girls were gendered. Their resentment was predominantly directed
towards the frat bros for their ‘obnoxious’ and ‘disrespectful’ behaviour.
The sorority girls, while definitely inauthentic participants in their eyes,
were ‘not hurting anyone [or] taking people’s spaces’. The frat bros were
criticized for pushing, shoving, fighting and generally ‘having fun at other
people’s expense’ – behaviours considered to be antithetical to the ethos of
PLUR. Compared with kandi ravers, interviewees were highly conscious of
the whiteness of the frat bros, often emphasizing this in their responses. For
example, Irene described frat bros as ‘really, really white. Like the white guys
with the tank tops … like the frat tank tops’. This emphasis on the whiteness
of the frat bros compared to the kandi ravers seems to relate not only to my
interviewees’ exposure to predominantly white fraternities and sororities in
college, but also to their understandings of whiteness being associated with
the self-entitled, disrespectful behaviour of frat bros. On the other hand,
the whiteness of the kandi ravers, the most authentic participants, remained
largely invisible.
Asian American participants’ discussions of the kandi ravers and
frat bros revolve around authenticity and belonging in the EDM festival
scene, which are framed as negotiations of different forms of middle-class
whiteness. They have come to understand kandi ravers as the embodiment
of authenticity and subcultural capital through their loyalty to PLUR
and frat bros as the embodiment of the mainstream and cultural capital
through their statuses as ‘popular’ and ‘obnoxious’ white men. While my
interviewees have turned to the EDM festival scene in order to seek access
to subcultural capital and belonging, these ideals are ultimately defined in
relation to middle-class whiteness.
Opposition to urban black hip-hop culture

The EDM festival scene not only represents middle-class whiteness, but also
represents anti-lower-class blackness through my informant’s beliefs that
‘rave culture’ was contrary to their imaginations of urban black hip-hop
culture. Toni Morrison (1992) has argued that qualities are attributed to
whiteness only in relationship to their absence in a racialized Other. I argue

that this definition through inversion also relates to classed understandings
of race, as middle-class whiteness is defined in opposition to lower-class
blackness. To my informants, hip-hop culture seems to represent the Other
that is antithetical to the middle-class whiteness of EDM festivals. This
classed understanding is an important factor behind my informants’ beliefs
that they can belong in the EDM festival scene through their strategic
internalization of the model minority myth, which suggests that Asian
Americans are culturally and socioeconomically closer to middle-class
whites than other nonwhite groups.
Only a couple of interviewees explicitly expressed middle-classed
understandings of EDM festival culture. Responding to why Asian American
youth are drawn to EDM festivals, Priya, a twenty-two-year-old Indian
American, noted that EDM attracts higher-income groups, implicitly defined
as white and Asian American, while her lower-income ‘black and Mexican
friends’ were more attracted to rap and hip-hop:
I think especially for me and especially for Asians that I know, most of
us are middle- or upper-middle-class, so I think it’s harder for people to
associate to things like rap or hip-hop, which is, you know, mostly talking
about struggle … which is probably why you see more of my black and
Mexican friends who are into other music like rap and hip-hop.
She further noted that the ticket prices for EDM festivals are ‘not cheap’, so
the events attract a higher income demographic. Through her discussion,
Priya points to two ways she believes that class position influences
engagement with cultural scenes. First, socioeconomic status influences the
types of cultural activities individuals can afford. Second, ‘class habitus’
draws them towards different types of musical and cultural scenes; that
is, the ‘long-lasting dispositions of mind and body’ derived from the
classed experiences of socialization, which in turn shape people’s cultural
engagements (Bourdieu 1986). When asked whether she associates EDM
with the middle- or upper-middle-class, Priya answered, ‘I think so’.
Nevertheless, she had trouble explaining exactly what makes EDM seem
middle- or upper-middle-class, except that she did not think EDM evoked
‘struggle’ like hip-hop.
Other interviewees also expressed inconsistent racialized and classed
understandings of EDM to explain why ‘Asian American youth are
more drawn to EDM than hip-hop music’. Nick, a twenty-four-year-old
Taiwanese American DJ-in-training, stated that he felt like EDM appeals
to Asian American youth because ‘it’s probably easier to relate to than a
lot of hip-hop. Like I don’t know about selling drugs or gang-banging’.
Nick implies that most hip-hop music invokes activities associated with the
(black) urban lower class, which Asian American youth would not relate to,
seemingly based on the sweeping assumption that most Asian Americans are
middle- or upper-middle-class. Nick further stated that in contrast to hip-
hop, EDM is ‘very international … because there are very little lyrics, or the
lyrics are very melodic so it’s not really about what the lyrics are … Everyone
can hear a good melody, you know?’ At this point, Nick pauses and seems
to realize that the idea that everyone can enjoy EDM equally contradicts
his earlier statement that he does not see many black participants at EDM
festivals. After some hesitation, he states that he does not know why Asian
American youth seem to be attracted to EDM. ‘It could be because there’s
something about it that other people don’t like about it, you know? Like
maybe there’s something about EDM that black people don’t like’. Nick’s
statements reveal how he negotiates the contradiction between his firm belief
that EDM is open to all racial groups and his observation that there are few
black participants in the scene. Instead of questioning whether EDM may
not be as ‘international’ and inclusive as he had claimed, Nick effectively
maintains his belief that EDM is not associated with any race by suggesting
that blacks simply do not choose to enjoy the music. This again represents an
instance of strategic ignorance as Nick seeks to justify his desire to become
a popular EDM DJ and believe that he would not encounter racism as an
Asian American.
Conclusion
Asian American youth have turned to the EDM festival scene to fill the
cultural void created by their status as perpetual foreigners. Yet, while
EDM festivals, particularly those organized by Insomniac, perpetuate
the promise of an egalitarian utopia through the PLUR ideology, both
the physical production of the events and the symbolic production of
authenticity in the scene reflect the dominance of middle-class whiteness.
My interviewees’ references to this middle-class whiteness were often
implicit, reflecting the normalization of whiteness in the EDM festival
scene, effectively hidden by the commodified ideology of PLUR. On the
other hand, my interviewees described the scene as explicitly antithetical
to lower-class blackness, which they believed was encapsulated by what
they understood to be hip-hop culture. These discussions served several
different strategic interests of the Asian American youth I interviewed, as
they justified their participation in the EDM festival scene dominated by
middle-class whiteness, associated themselves more closely with middle-
class whiteness and disassociated themselves from the oppressions of
other nonwhite groups by adhering to cultural racism. My interviewees’
discussions of the contemporary EDM festival scene reflected and
perpetuated the belief of middle-class whiteness as the desirable norm and
lower-class blackness as the undesirable Other.
In this chapter, I have aimed to fill critical gaps at the intersections of cultural
studies and Asian American studies. I have argued that previous scholarship on
raves and EDM festivals has largely overlooked the opportunity to analyse the
disjunction between the egalitarian ideology of raves and dominant ideologies
of race and class. Meaningful complements to my study would include the
study of race, class, gender or sexuality among other non-middle-class-
heterosexual-white participants in EDM festivals or other scenes dominated
by middle-class whiteness. This chapter also calls for more research on the
engagement of Asian American youth with popular and underground cultures,
particularly research that adopts a more ethnographic approach given the
limited participant observation in my preliminary findings. I have argued that
Asian Americans provide a unique lens on the normalization of whiteness
in various cultural scenes, as their ‘perpetual foreigner’ status often invokes
desires for cultural belonging, while the ‘model minority’ myth characterizes
Asian Americans as similarly middle-classed as whites, albeit to advance
white interests. I also argue that the current lack of scholarly attention on
the cultural engagements of Asian American youth further perpetuates the
notion that Asian Americans are perpetual foreigners with unique, segregated
cultures rather than meaningful participants in cultural scenes, as observed in
the EDM festival scene in Southern California.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Dr Sadhana Bery for her advising of my research.
I would also like to thank Dr Alison Denton Jones and Dr Chiwen Bao for
their advice and encouragement, as well as the Harvard College Research
Program for the funding of this research. Lastly, I would like to express
my sincere gratitude to each of my interviewees for willingly sharing their
experiences and expressing their belief in the value of this study.
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PART TWO
Underground
Networks and
Transformational
Events
CHAPTER FOUR
Boutiquing at the Raindance

Campout: Relational Aesthetics
as Festival Technology
Bryan Schmidt
Introduction
Operating in California since 2005, the Raindance Campout departs from
mega-music festival models by building an aesthetically customized, social
and spiritual experience. With a maximum capacity of just 1,000 people,
and no indication that admission limits will soon be significantly raised,
Raindance exemplifies what some festivalgoers call a ‘boutique’ festival,
an intentionally small-scale event that caters to a specific subculture in its
music and aesthetics. Usually run for profit, boutique festivals emphasize
style, personality and community over big-name attractions and spectacle
firepower, drawing tight-knit circles (or ‘tribes’) instead of disparate crowds.
For Raindance, this means including intellectual, spiritual and aesthetic
components to distinguish itself from the myriad other events in the California
festival ecosystem. In addition to DJs spinning day and night on amplified
sound stages built in lush, natural settings, the gathering hosts a range of
organized rituals, psychedelic art displays and workshops on subjects like
Chakra Yoga and ‘Aquaponics with Applied Permaculture’. Raindance
combines electronic dance music, artisanal vending, intricately constructed
outdoor spaces that house performances and lectures, and a spiritual

component linked to the ‘New Paradigm’ (a contemporary redeployment of
New Age) that integrates – and, it might be argued, appropriates – cultural
practices from East Asia, South Asia, South America and, especially, pre-
colonial America.
The brainchild of DJ John Edmonds (commonly known as Little John),
Raindance is a product of the Santa Cruz underground rave scene with
related events spanning back to 1995. Although Raindance now takes
place far from Santa Cruz (at least a four- to six-hour drive, generally), it
maintains a connection to the local scene, with DJs and much of the crowd
hailing from that area and returning to the festival year after year. Though
open to the general public, the ticketing link for Raindance 2013 referred
to participants as a ‘private group’ and sold ‘membership passes for our
annual private gathering’, suggesting an attempt to retain a social dynamic
that does not extend far from its original constituency (Raindance Presents
2013a). As one first-time attendee put it: ‘Raindance is a family affair –
everyone knows each other and has been a part of the [Northern California]
underground tribe for a long time. Refined, evolved lifers, industry players,
baller growers, local hicks, old-school scenesters, down-to-earth artists
and misfit freaks made up the crowd, which felt experienced, passionate
and highly stylized’ (KnowFun 2014). For this Raindancer, the feeling
of a tight-knit community is attractive. His valorization of experience
and stylization speak to how boutique festivals create unique, appealing
subcultural articulations – sociality distinctive enough to be considered part
of the festival’s attractions but manifested through the improvised activities
of the participants themselves, rather than prepared stagings by organizers.
By perceiving members of the crowd as ‘experienced’, ‘refined’, ‘evolved’, the
reviewer enunciates participants’ ability to hold space in unique ways as a
kind of artistic skill, one that can be developed through practice.
Writing about boutique festivals in relation to theatre performance, Georgia
Seffrin positions such small-scale events on a continuum between high art
and popular entertainment: ‘[T]he boutique festival [is] located between the
“department store” model of arts festival production, whereby audiences
purchase tickets for a range of often avant-garde and dazzling international
aesthetic experiences, and the community arts event, in which the focus is
on the experience of the participant, and not on polished, dazzling work’
(2007: 67, emphasis added). While this definition may helpfully identify
certain scalar aspects of boutique events, it repeats a typical highbrow–
lowbrow aesthetic distinction wherein rudimentary, community-level art is
contrasted to the presumably more mature work of the avant-garde. This
common division, however, falters if comments like those of the Raindance
participant quoted earlier are taken at their word. In his comments there
appears to be no such divide between community and polished (‘refined’,
‘evolved’) art; rather, the social performance of the community itself has the
BOUTIQUING AT THE RAINDANCE CAMPOUT 95
capacity to achieve artistic excellence. This suggests an alternative aesthetic

regime that scrambles traditional systems of critique, which rely on clear-cut
divides between high and low art. Boutique festivals, then, cannot simply
be addressed in terms of the quality and scale of their production but must
be understood to inaugurate their own particular stylizations and modes of
evaluation.
In this chapter, I wish to use the Raindance Campout as a case study to
think through how social practice can take on aesthetic qualities. The event
typifies trends in global festival culture that emphasize organizing principles
based on generating interpersonal connection and dialogue to create an
artistic synergy within temporary constructed spaces – trends that have now
started to be adopted by large-scale, highly corporate events as well. Yet
small-scale, boutique festivals should not be looked at as large festivals in-
waiting. That is, they should not be characterized by what they lack, be it large
crowds, high-profile musical acts or spectacle firepower; instead, boutique
festivals should be considered sites for personal and subcultural identity-
making based on playful, improvised, personal encounters with other
participants, and it is towards this activity that their art, music, workshops,
architecture and even vending are oriented. Raindance thrives by generating
affective ties between participants through momentary encounters that
occur not only on the main dancefloors but also in interstitial, participant-
created performance sites: renegade sound stages, altars and installations,
drum circles, theme camps.
In what follows, I first investigate the creative potency of Raindance
by considering it through the lens of what art curator and critic Nicholas
Bourriaud calls ‘relational aesthetics’, work that creates social situations
(rather than objects for contemplation) and takes as its theoretical horizon the
field of human interaction. Bourriaud’s theory provides a critical apparatus
that allows us to consider the festival space as one co-created by participants
and organizers, where the event’s music, dance, sculpture, workshops and
ritual practices become social interstices that facilitate micropractices of
intersubjectivity; these induce a sense of alterity vis-à-vis quotidian forms
of political economy. Within the space of a boutique festival, I argue,
relational aesthetics solidify subcultural ties by creating a feeling of
communality – a bond that helps instil a value system determined by the
event’s framing dramaturgies. While such practices are present at large-scale
events as well, the relative intimacy of boutique festivals – which affords
the sense of a personalized, exclusive experience – creates a rarefied air
that makes subcultural identification more acute. To members of relevant
circles, attending boutique festivals confers what cultural sociologist Sarah
Thornton (following Pierre Bourdieu) calls ‘subcultural capital’, the bona
fides that allow entry into a niche community and distinguish oneself
from the mainstream (1995: 27). In the context of leave-no-trace boutique
festivals like Raindance, which lack sizable archives or media visibility, using
relational aesthetics as an analytical lens helps us understand the mechanics,

stylization and political economy of subcultural identity-making.
Relying on observations noted while attending the 2013 and 2014
Raindance Campouts as a participant-observer (both times working as a
volunteer), I begin by discussing how Raindance might be viewed as an
example of relational art. While, for Bourriaud, relational aesthetics carry
an inherently progressive and democratizing energy, following prominent
critiques of the theory I suggest that their political implications are more
murky – potent yet indeterminate. To help unpack the larger implications of
this small festival, then, I conclude by discussing Raindance as an example
of an emerging category of similar events known as ‘transformational
festivals’; this serves to illuminate the dramaturgy that guides participants
and organizers towards specific ethical imperatives, as well as to highlight
some of the political prerogatives that attend such practices.
Raindance as relational art

Discussing his fifteen-year career throwing parties and festivals, Little
John describes his motivation in terms of building scenarios that allow for
improvised and combinative artistic expression: ‘I personally like to provide
space for creative people to be able to express themselves through music,
dance, painting, stilt walking – whatever your creative passion is, bring it,
do it, throw it in the mix’ (Limbach 2010). Little John’s impetus for creating
events like Raindance characterize the festival’s power as deriving not so
much from the spectacle technologies and sensorial stimulation that amount
to ‘putting on a show’ – massive sound systems, choreographed light
shows, pyrotechnics, etc. – but from its ability to summon artistic display
enacted by the participants themselves. Many, perhaps even a majority of
Raindance participants identify as artists in some respect, and the festival
brings together their creative energy in order to build a unique synergy.
Staging a festival involves developing aesthetically heightened zones that
attract social interaction, and logistically enabling participants to do the same.
Much like Katherine Chen’s characterization of the organizing strategies of
Burning Man (considered by many to be the progenitor of contemporary
alternative festival culture), orchestrating an event like Raindance is a
matter of attracting talented individuals to the event, motivating them to
contribute and creating an infrastructure that allows the free flow of artistic
energy (2009).
The characterization of artistic practice as a process of instigating (rather
than enacting) creative expression coincides with Nicholas Bourriaud’s
theorizing on relational art in his book Relational Aesthetics. Bourriaud
defines relational art as ‘an art taking as its theoretical horizon the realm
of human interactions and its social context, rather than the assertion of an
independent and private symbolic space’ (2002: 5). He contrasts relational

art to object-oriented modes of art-making characteristic of modernity,
wherein a completed piece gets consumed by a patron, who is excluded
from the act of creation and presumed to be passive when interfacing with
the artwork. Relational aesthetics, instead, present an art form ‘where the
substrate is formed by intersubjectivity, and which takes being-together as
a central theme, the “encounter” between beholder and picture, and the
collective elaboration of meaning’ (2002: 5–6, emphasis added). In other
words, the artwork is not a materialized manifestation of the artist’s private
imagination but the performative interplay that results from people coming
into contact with the piece itself, and with each other in the spatio-temporal
frame presented by the piece.
Little John seems to echo this sentiment: ‘To me it’s like, if you’re a
painter, you have your canvas, you have your paints, you have an idea
of what you want to paint, and that’s your thing. For me, it’s like a three
dimensional, living, breathing painting that I set up, and create this whole
interactive art space of music, sound, artists’ (Limbach 2010). His artistic
product is not a sculpture, painting or concert; it is not even the architecture
of the festival space itself, with its sound stages, installations and tentscape.
It is, rather, the participant-generated performances that activate these sites
in real time. While Bourriaud developed relational aesthetics as a way of
explaining 1990s interactive gallery art, his theory helps us understand the
labour necessary to create the decorated dancefloors, altars, sculptures and
lighting displays scattered throughout the festival; they are not intended to
be the festival’s foci, but their loci, gathering points that prompt meaningful
human performance.
The performances that take place at Raindance are infinitely variable
and may or may not correspond to recognized artistic genres. The festival
brings different forms of art-making together within a single space, allowing
them to intersect with one another. There is, of course, music: Santa Cruz
‘family DJ’s’, acts from the greater California area and usually a couple
of international artists.1 There is dancing: scrums bouncing in front of
the sound stages, flow artists spinning glowing poi, staves or hula–hoops,
tweaked-out loners on the periphery bizarrely swaying with the beat. There
is painting: artists with canvases just to the side of the dancefloor creating
vibrant, visceral, visionary art; they colour with techniques so nuanced that
the images seem to subtly bend and warp, injected with a kind of kineticism.
There are poetry readings, water sculptures, electro-kinematic installations
1
Santa Cruz family DJs include Brother, Digital Honey, Stridah, The Pirate, Mozaic, Dax,
Rob Monroy and Little John himself. Festival headliners in the last few years have included
Vibesquad, Pumpkin, Random Rab, Bluetech, Shpongle, Om Unit, Thugfucker, Eprom, Marty
Party and Russ Liquid.
and much more. What makes the space so exciting, though, is the saturation
of talented individuals in close proximity, enabling them to scaffold their
creative energies by riffing off one another: a visual artist’s brush strokes
become guided by the music (see Figure 4.1); a dancer creates an elaborate
choreography using a bedazzled sceptre she borrows from a metal
sculptor; painters design crazy body art that circulates the grounds through
ambulation. Even staged rituals are made all the more potent through
musical accompaniment and by taking place near beautifully designed altars
that incorporate spiritual icons from around the world.
Art emerges in unexpected places: walking from the main dancefloor
back to your campsite, for instance, you might encounter a well-made
stone stack, a light installation hanging from the trees, a theme camp
with carpets and pillows decorated with East Asian spiritual symbols to
encourage impromptu meditation. Sometimes enhanced by participants’
use of hallucinogens, these eye-catching areas become assembly points for
meaningful interaction. One evening, as I strolled through a wooded area
in the quieter part of the festival grounds, I stumbled upon a van that had
been converted into a mini sound stage, complete with turntables, amps and
small, rotating LEDs; as amateur DJs spun their jams, passers-by gathered
around to listen, dance and converse. Someone started spinning poi, which
prompted me to join him; a woman began to wildly dance, going airborne
with each base drop, stinging the ground with her foot and kicking up dirt
into the eyes of those standing around; someone else came by and offered
to rub fine-scented oils on anyone who cared for it. The entire event was
FIGURE 4.1 A painter creates visionary art near the dancefloor of a Raindance
sound stage. Photo: Bryan Schmidt (2013).
aesthetically heightened, too, by participants’ costumes, face paint and

trendy festivalwear (many components of which could be purchased in the
festival’s vending tents): tunics, boots, utility belts, corsets, glowing boas,
bangles, feathers, jewellery of all kinds, snazzy fedoras with ostentatious
feathers sticking out, a woman with a fur tail, a guy in a child’s tiger onesie.
The saturation and simultaneity of these myriad creative activities in the
space of the festival blurs disciplinary boundaries, breaks down the barrier
between quotidian life and aesthetic encounter, collapses the binary between
performer and spectator and troubles the notion of a stable, structural
artistic frame – where and when, precisely, does quotidian life end and the
aesthetic experience begin? Cultivating a participatory ethic, the festival
itself becomes an example of what performance scholar Wendy Clupper
Meier calls a ‘heightened theatrical zone’, where self-performing, role-
playing and collective collaboration become operative modes of being, and
which opens up space for the remaking of identity (2007: 170). Likewise,
Graham St John describes similar visionary art festivals as hyperliminal
spaces that ‘expose participants to disparate modes of self-dissolution and
reflexivity’ (2014: 64).
The potential for unexpected and aesthetically rich performance activity
to crop up at any moment invigorates the Raindance space and binds its
populace together. Discussing the performance event, theatre scholar
Erika Fischer-Lichte uses the concept of the ‘autopoietic feedback loop’
to describe the invisible, self-generating energies that connect participants
to one another; by creating an oscillating sense of the self as performer
and the self as spectator, subject and object, participants are plunged into a
state of liminality2 (2008: 12). In doing so, the performance event scrambles
notions of the self and primes participants for communal transformation
(2008: 50). Considering Raindance through the lens of relational aesthetics
allows for the notion that, within the container of the event space, art is
everywhere and always a performance event; it can arise unexpectedly, co-
generated, free-form, disciplinarily intersectional, subject to momentary
contingencies. Fischer-Lichte’s theorizing might be seen to operate in
conjunction with Bourriaud’s, which characterizes artistic practice as an
experimental production of new social bonds; together, they point to a way
of understanding how the density of creative activity at Raindance might
lead to powerful forms of subcultural identification. Its boutique size and
ability to summon the tight-knit Santa Cruz dance music community create
circumstances wherein familiarity and repeated encounter give rise to a
sense of intimacy and intersubjectivity.
2
Fischer-Lichte elaborates on this form of liminality as a feeling of existing ‘between the norms
and rules of art and everyday life, between aesthetic and ethical imperatives’ (2008: 12).
The limits of relational aesthetics

While intersubjective connections may be intensely meaningful to festival
participants, it is crucial to question their durability and political directionality
rather than assume their inherent value. Scholars have rightly critiqued
Bourriaud’s sanguine approach to the development of relational aesthetics
on a number of different grounds, especially the liberatory rhetoric that
accompanies it. For Bourriaud, relational art is without a doubt a positive
innovation, one that ‘permit[s] the development of new political and cultural
designs’ through dialogic interaction; it is capable of generating new economic
possibilities by allowing for micropolitical disengagements from the dominant
system of capitalist exchange:
Over and above its mercantile nature and its semantic value, the work
of art represents a social interstice. This interstice term was used by Karl
Marx to describe trading communities that elude the capitalist economic
context by being removed from the law of profit: barter, merchandising,
autarkic types of production, etc. The interstice is a space in human
relations which fits more or less harmoniously and openly into the overall
system, but suggests other trading possibilities than those in effect within
the system (2002: 6).
Bourriaud recognizes that relational art still operates as a commodity, but,

as Stewart Martin notes, he sees it as having ‘an essentially critical relation
to capitalist culture, defined by its resistance to exchange-value and, at least
implicitly, its struggle with subjection to the value form’ (2007: 376).
Bourriaud’s belief in the positive potential of these temporary
rearticulations of capitalism (rather than the sustained engagement of
more classical leftist projects) aligns with festival communities’ faith in the
creation of transitory sites that enable alternative social practices as a foil to
corporate consumerist culture. This is especially apparent in the cultivation
of alternative economic practices at festivals, such as the artisanal and gift
economies present at boutique events like Raindance. The artisanal economy
consists of artists, jewellers, metallurgists, clothing designers and food sellers
who attempt to counter the apparatus of mass production by vending goods
that they themselves have produced. Such an economy operates through
personal encounter, attempting to reframe the exchange event as a site for
interpersonal connection between buyer and seller instead of the alienation
normalized in industrial capitalism. The profit motive is still operative, but
it is not the end of the story; vendors in an artisanal economy sacrifice the
possibility of a potentially more profitable scale of production in order
to create objects that retain the aura of their creator’s labour, and which
circulate among participants assumed to share similar values.
In a gift economy, made famous through events like Burning Man,

participants appear to abandon the profit motive altogether; they donate
to the community goods, services, art objects, performances and lectures –
labour for which one typically receives compensation in the quotidian
world. The presence of these free items and activities are part of the draw of
events like Raindance, and those who offer them appear to allow the event
to capitalize on their labour power for no or minimal compensation (at
most the waiving of the admission fee, and this only for those whose labour
would be valued much higher in the outside marketplace). Yet, to view
such donations as complete disavowals of the profit motive occludes the
(sub) cultural capital generated by this seemingly free labour. Whether
conscious of it or not, what participants sacrifice by declining to sell
their work they gain in reputation within the community, a status that is
sometimes parlayed into gigs or commissions for larger, more financially
lucrative venues and ventures. Such a system creates the veneer of eschewing
capitalist exchange but does not necessarily escape its perquisites.
Martin pushes back against the notion that temporary rearticulations of
capitalism, particularly in the context of an artistic event, actually lead to
realistic models for the future. Quite to the contrary, he believes that they
are ‘helplessly reversible into an aestheticisation of novel forms of capitalist
exchange’, further abstracting the logics of capital even as they attempt to
transcend them (2007: 371). Even though alternative economic practices
occur at festivals like Raindance, attending the event itself is a form of
exchange, one more in line with what economists Joseph Pine II and James
H. Gilmore term the ‘experience economy’, than with the more typical
exchange of goods and services (1999). Bourriaud’s theory fails to account
for the cultural capital generated by participating in relational aesthetics,
which ultimately reasserts the value form presumed to be bracketed off
when in the social interstice. The claim to an ‘authentic’ community that
exists outside the mainstream market is itself laden with cultural capital;
yet, as with events like Burning Man, claiming alterity vis-à-vis the quotidian
does not release participants from the market’s sign game or social logics
(Kozinets 2002: 36). Rather, the required intersection with mainstream
capitalism to generate the technology and materials necessary to produce
Raindance’s relational art gets abstracted through the social interaction
that occurs around it. The affective ties boutique festivals generate create
memorable, moving, even transformational experiences, but they also create
loyal customers. Keeping this in mind is crucial to understanding how,
despite creating liminoid spaces that house alternative economic structures,
boutique festivals still plug into normative macroeconomic paradigms.
Claire Bishop has also argued vehemently against assuming, as Bourriaud
does, the a priori politicality of relational art. She notes that because
‘[Bourriaud] regards the open-ended participatory work of art as more
ethical and political in implication than the autonomous, finite object’, the
interactive premise of relational art is seen as inherently superior to optical
contemplation, which is deemed passive and disengaged; yet, ‘underlying
[this] argument about relational aesthetics is the presumption that dialogue
is in and of itself democratic’ – far from a foregone conclusion (2005:
118–19). For Bishop, the fundamental flaw in Bourriaud’s argument is that
the conversations created around relational art tend to be between people
who already have much in common: gallery goers with similar dispositions
towards art consumption, or, in the case of boutique festivals, subcultural
groupings with pre-established aesthetic interests, agreed upon rules for social
conduct and similar political postures. Instead of more agonistic models
of democracy that embrace concepts like subject–group difference (Laclau
and Mouffe 1985) or dissensus (Rancière 2010), Bourriaud’s discussion of
relational art points towards a liberal-democratic utopia in which frictions
and antagonisms between disparate subjects simply disappear.
This critique certainly holds weight in the context of Raindance, a space
in which participants are already bound together through common location,
artistic tastes and lifestyle choices, as well as important identity-positional
attributes like class and race (the festival’s population, like most in the
California scene, is by a vast majority white and middle or upper-middle
class). Indeed, events like Raindance tend to be judged on criteria like ‘good
vibes’, an unspoken copasetic quality that values minimal conflict and the
feeling of social cohesion. This is not to say that conflicts do not occur,
but they tend to manifest on a personal level rather than through political
positioning, and organizers attempt to police it when it becomes outwardly
visible and threatens the harmony of the space.
I acknowledge these powerful critiques of relational aesthetics to make
clear that I see the theory as offering a way of understanding the formal
qualities of Raindance’s artistic practice, the intentionality integral to
creating festival spaces and the efficacy such work has in solidifying
subcultural ties – but not as an apparatus to assert the revolutionary
qualities of boutique festivals. In fact, the critiques levelled at relational
aesthetics are useful for understanding contradictions that arise in
the politics of festival culture, wherein too often the creative ethos
and transformational project get positioned as inherently critical and
progressive. The reality, I suggest, is far murkier.
But questioning Bourriaud’s assumptions regarding the a priori
progressivism of relational art should not amount to ignoring its potency.
We should instead think about what might be achieved by viewing relational
aesthetics as a technology, a way of reifying or disseminating ideology via the
immanence of participation. Relational aesthetics act as a kind of spectacle,
but a spectacle that operates differently than that famously theorized by
Guy Debord (which Bourriaud sought to counter in writing Relational
Aesthetics). They present, instead, an encoding power that, as performance
scholar Margaret Werry writes, is not ‘hegemonically totalizing, [but

instead] a transversal, constellated and coincidental, mobile and multiple
cultural formation, open to the intransigence, desire, and momentum of
the subjects it produces’ (2005: 381). Festivals constitute diffuse ideological
apparatuses that utilize the creative energy of participants to consecrate a
particular ethico-political position – one that is often inexplicit, but which
can be gleaned from sustained attention to participants’ activities and event
dramaturgies. Self-identifying through their disidentification with an imagined
mainstream (e.g. the ‘misfit freaks’3 described by the Raindance attendee
in this chapter’s introduction), boutique festivals and their participants
use the language and poetics of subculture to declare independence from
certain normative paradigms (industrial capitalism, mass consumer culture,
etc.). But in distancing themselves from this position, they abstract the way
other mainstream values get reified – as I will discuss in greater detail later.
With their participatory nature a catalyst for subcultural identity formation,
relational aesthetics help naturalize the idea that a community’s values are
self-generated, primal aspects of the individual or subculture itself – rather
than the ideological residue of an opposing social structure.
Viewing relational aesthetics as a technology forces us to question the
purposes towards which that technology gets deployed, directing us to
consider the discourse that frames events like Raindance. To do so, in the
following section I discuss how Raindance operates within an emerging
category of events called transformational festivals, whose ethical system
has lately begun to be codified and disseminated. Communicated through
Raindance’s website, advertisements and framing rituals, as well as through
popular online hubs frequented by festival regulars, this ethical system
constitutes the major dramaturgy that bounds the performance event
prompted by relational art. My goal here is not to produce a comprehensive
and definitive accounting of Raindance’s politics, but to consider a couple
of axes on which the concept of ‘transformation’ is built in order to reveal
what it abstracts.
What transformation?
A[n] experience as unbelievable as Raindance 2014 is few and far
between. My soul and body is fiercely cleansed of all pain and stress
involved in my life. I literally cried harder than I ever have because of
3
The ‘freak’, as discussed by Arun Saldanha, performs oppositionality via the dominant social
structure that governs her/him. His chapter ‘Goa Freaks’ provides an excellent conversation on
the conceptual history of the freak and how it relates festival/rave culture – especially in regards
to the culture’s ethical and racial dynamics (2007).
laughing soooo hard. The thing that makes me smile about it now is
knowing that I was [consciously unconscious] the whole time. For my life
to change for the better in that state of mind [I] feel unbelievably blessed.
So from here … with a clean canvas I am super exited to learn and grow
with my family and have my heart beat again (Briscoe 2014).
[Raindance web advertisement:] The term ‘transformational festival’ was
not even a buzz word when we started. We just knew we were on to
something special. We knew it deserved to be nurtured and cultivated,
and yet had no idea that ten years later there would be so many amazing
festivals, and that the West Coast would become a trendsetter for
conscious gathering evolution (Andy 2014).
I want to frame this section by discussing a participant-created water

sculpture and altar given prominent placement on the festival grounds
in both 2013 and 2014 (Figure 4.2). An example of relational art, it
encapsulates the political axes I wish to explore in Raindance as a whole.
The piece consisted of two pools stacked on top of one another, lined
with dozens of wooden slats like a giant crate; water flowed through a
spout from the top pool to the lower one, and a solar-powered pump cycled
it back up again, creating a continuous loop so that the tranquil sound of
running water continued for the festival’s duration. A variety of cultural-
geographical images and artefacts lined the structure: a figurine of Krishna
holding a flute, two Buddha heads, candles depicting Jesus Christ and the
Virgin of Guadalupe, a picture of the Painted Desert, a San Pedro cactus,
a clay vase featuring a brown-skinned figure with a headdress holding a
potted plant (seemingly a Central American derivation), a wood-carved
Native American face wearing a plumed headdress. The artist, Gerasimos
Christoforatos, who produced the piece as a gift to the Raindance
community, deployed these symbols as an attempt to ‘incorporate all the
different religions of the world, to represent the unification of what we
might all consider to be spirituality’.4
Christoforatos’ sculpture also served a functional purpose, working as an
operational hydroponic and permaculture system. Troughs growing small
herbs lined the top pool, while the bottom one contained fish; waste from
the fish pumped back up to the top tank to help fertilize the plants, and
in turn, the runoff from the plants helped feed the fish – both could be
harvested for human consumption.
The piece constitutes a particularly visible example of relational art
at Raindance, presumably seen by everyone and built with the intention
of encouraging people to ‘hold space’ with one another by presenting
an aesthetically and spiritually charged environment. As Christoforatos
4
Gerasimos Christoforatos, phone interview with the author, 5 November 2014.
FIGURE 4.2 Water sculpture with permaculture system created by Gerasimos

Christophoratos. Photo: Gerasimos Christophoratos (2013).
expresses, the piece was incomplete upon its arrival; it grew to completion
via the acts of communal co-creation that it prompted:
People would bring certain kinds of stones or crystals and different

candles and incense, different types of artistic metal objects; they may
bring things to hang around the Buddha’s neck – medicine pouches, little
pendants of eagles. And things build up over time as people leave objects
behind. So we reach this climax where people are giving what they have
to offer to the piece, and just as the event is over and the climax is over,
things get taken apart; and just as it’s built up it’s also built down.5
Through the community’s donations, Christoforatos sees the sculpture

taking on a lifespan coincident with the duration of the festival, generating
a kind of community aura. This, he proposes, extends beyond objects placed
upon the sculpture to performance practices, rituals and social encounters
that occurred around it: a man who set up a desk nearby and wrote poetry,
a juggler who attracted onlookers as he practiced, even some confused
partiers who used the sculpture to fill their drinking bottles. In 2013, the
piece demarcated one of Raindance’s workshop spaces, hosting intellectual
and embodied classes: ‘Making a wild-crafted hydrosol’, ‘Herbal medicine
for the home’, ‘Spirits in a bottle’,6 ‘Weaving a dreamcatcher’, ‘Finding your
inner Jedi’, and ‘Anchors with Wings’.7 For Christoforatos, all of this was
absorbed into the sculpture itself, endowing it with an energy that reflected
the ethos of the festival community.
Through thinking about this sculpture, we can see a number of tropes
associated with Raindance as a whole:
1. An emphasis on ecology and sustainability, and a particular

fascination with water.8
2. A non-specific spirituality that mixes elements from different world
religions and indigenous cultural practices.
3. An emphasis on identity-making and the unleashing of personal
potential through spiritual practice – in a word: transformation.
Over the past ten to fifteen years, a number of similar electronic dance
music events sharing these values have cropped up primarily in California
and British Columbia, coming to be known as transformational festivals.
Raindance does not explicitly label itself a transformational festival on its
logo or website, but as the advertisement that begins this section indicates,
5
Gerasimos Christoforatos, phone interview with the author, 5 November 2014.
6
A workshop on aromatics, essential oils and plant spirits.
7
‘A playful exploration of core essence using transformational life coaching techniques and
creative inquiry exercises’ (Raindance Presents 2013b).
8
The presence of water has always been an important element of the Raindance Campout. In the
early years, the event was held in a Scout camp near Santa Cruz that had a swimming pool; in
recent years, the festival occurred on the Yuba River (2013) and Feather River (2014). The river
provided a refreshing place for participants to cool off during hot California afternoons (a
nearby sound stage helping to build the party), as well as a site for daily water blessings and
yoga practice that took place in the morning and evening.
administrators are aware of the term’s growing cachet and embrace being
categorized as such.
The term ‘transformational festival’ is relatively new, having only emerged
in the last five years or so, and largely due to the efforts of Jeet-Kei Leung,
an avid participant in the West Coast festival scene and documentarian
of electronic dance music culture. Leung’s TEDx Vancouver talk in 2010,
entitled ‘Transformational Festivals and the New Evolutionary Culture’,
codified the term around a series of event models, principles and aesthetics,
and helped disseminate it widely among festival participants and organizers.
Leung parlayed his talk into a Kickstarter campaign that led to the creation
of a four-part documentary of transformational festivals called the Bloom
Series, and an accompanying web portal that helped solidify their ethics and
poetics.9
According to Leung, transformational festivals are powered by the
co-creation of an immersive, participant-driven reality (what I’m here
associating with relational aesthetics). They are distinguished from other
festival genres by the following qualities: an ecstatic core ritual provided
through electronic dance music; visionary art, performance, art installations
and live art; a workshop curriculum covering a spectrum of New Paradigm
subjects; the creation and honouring of sacred space; ceremony and ritual;
a social economy of artisans and vendors (or, alternative gift economy); a
natural, outdoor setting to honour the Earth; and a multiple (typically 3–7)
day duration (The Bloom Series 2013).
Leung frames transformational festivals as ‘a cultural renaissance in
progress’, an ‘evolution’ and a conduit for ‘building a better world’ (The
Bloom Series 2013). Like Bourriaud, his language creates a teleological
narrative of positive development, a dramaturgy that frames the Raindance
experience as a participatory critical project. Yet, when we consider that
transformational festivals arise within the context of North American
liberalism, a number of axes emerge on which we might consider their
distinctive political positionality: economic structure, spiritual inflection,
sexual, gender10 and racial politics, etc. Certainly, as these events gain
momentum and spread beyond the West Coast scene, efforts should be
made to more comprehensively account for these various aspects. However,
seeking to avoid straying from my subject thus far, here I wish only to
briefly discuss two major areas made visible through Christophoratos’
previously discussed artwork: first, the ecological ethos cultivated within the
9
Leung is also writing a book with the working title: ‘Dancing Together into the Great Shift:
Transformational Festivals & the New Evolutionary Culture’.
10
In Leung’s TEDx Vancouver talk, he discusses ‘gender alchemy’ (a challenge to the Manichean
male/female divide) and ‘models of compatible diversity’ as formative components of the
transformational festival movement (TEDxTalks 2011).
festival space; and second, a form of spirituality that grafts contemporary

technology to practices of indigenous culture, what Leung refers to as
‘Ancient future culture’ (TEDxTalks 2011).
Ecological ethos
Christophoratos gifted his water sculpture to the Raindance community
in order to ‘educate people about sustainability so that we can spread this
kind of technology to make a difference here and abroad’. While technically
not 100 per cent self-sustaining (the system can be run on solar power,
but requires modest nutritional supplementation), the altar itself performs
homeostasis by displaying a self-perpetuating life cycle between plant and
animal – bioprocesses at perfect equilibrium. The cultural symbols that
surround it depict humans as the stewards of this equilibrium, rather than
antagonists. The sculpture’s cyclical permaculture functionality, beauty
and relational aesthetics crystalize how transformational festivals generate
an environmentally oriented politics among its populace. Acting as both
inspiration and (through workshops dedicated to teaching sustainable living
techniques) training grounds, they seek to spread ecological consciousness
beyond the festival frame.
All transformational festivals are leave-no-trace events, where organizers
guarantee that, post-festival, the land will be left in as pristine shape as
before participants arrived. The leave-no-trace ethos is central to generating
feelings of subcultural belonging vis-à-vis other, presumably more hedonistic
events. When I attended Raindance, I remember discussing with some
people camping near me how they could no longer bring themselves to
attend festivals without the leave-no-trace label because of their discomfort
with the trash politics that accompany them – not only the beer bottles,
wrappers and cigarette butts unthinkingly strewn across the event grounds,
but the way that a culture of ecological carelessness intersected with
human relationality to make for a colder, more impersonal environment.
In contrast, practices of trash consciousness – picking up one’s cigarette
butts and placing them in a snazzy pouch, or converting beer cans into
recycled sculptures – reverberate throughout transformational festival
spaces, constituting ecological microperformances that reify communal
solidarity through a sense of shared ethics.
Of course, leave-no-trace events can never hope to literally leave no
trace. Cigarette butts get picked up, string and twine tangled in trees get
taken down, but even if visible markers of the event disappear, traces can be
found at the molecular level: soap used for making giant bubbles (a playful
relational art activity I saw both years I attended Raindance) that sinks into
the soil, or a feather from someone’s festive boa that gets trampled into
the ground. While I do not suggest that participants are ignorant of this
contradiction, I want to point out that since leave-no-trace eschews unseen
remnants of festival activity, it normalizes a perceptual frame that can only

account for concrete, visible forms of environmental impact.
Furthermore, leave-no-trace is achieved partly through the labour of
volunteers who patrol the grounds picking up trash in exchange for a
free ticket to the festival after three four-hour shifts. In 2014, the festival
added a $25 ‘impact fee’ for all participants, including volunteers, to offset
the labour and logistical costs of making the event carbon-neutral. While
these aspects no doubt illustrate the legitimate attention organizers pay
to environmental concerns and weave an ecological ethos into the event’s
dramaturgy, they also authorize consumption patterns wherein the labour
that sustains them gets abstracted. Transformational festivals necessarily
impact the environment through the fuel burnt to generate the wattage
required to run sound stages and lighting displays, and to travel into
remote spaces. But participants and organizers view this as a strategy, where
the training and consciousness-raising that takes place within the space
outweighs the heightened consumption patterns perceived to generate this
momentum. Seen thus, events like Raindance constitute what Slavoj Žižek
calls a ‘chocolate laxative’, a calling card of contemporary liberal society
wherein ‘the very thing which causes damage should already be the medicine’
(2004); the impact fee, combined with the leave-no-trace policy (encouraged
through community self-regulation but only guaranteed through organizers’
post-festival management), potentially reifies unsustainable consumption
patterns that accompany the event’s Saturnalian atmosphere.
Ancient future culture

It is unclear precisely how the Raindance name came about – some say that
it arose to reference an unusually dry summer at the time of the company’s
founding, while the poster for the group’s first event (a ‘Tribal Dance
Party’) suggests an homage to ritual practices in Ancient Egypt and Africa
(Raindance Presents 2014). Regardless of the derivation, suffice it to say
the event’s name characterizes it as a fusion of contemporary recreational
practice (camping) with indigenous ritual, and this carries through to the
spiritual inflection of the festival’s contemporary iteration.
The transformational festival movement encourages signifiers of
indigenous culture to get deployed alongside contemporary technologies
that create a heightened state of aesthetic richness (light shows, synthesizers,
hallucinogens, etc.) in order to induce a return to what are presumed to
be more sustainable environmental practices and more respectful human
interactions. Placed throughout Raindance, for instance, were dreamcatchers,
a totem pole, a teepee; altars (like the one described earlier) included
figurines and symbols reflecting indigenous cultures from around the globe;
paintings depicted indigenous bodies fused with cybernetic technologies
(see Figure 4.3); participants wore headdresses, moccasins, beaded vests
FIGURE 4.3 A piece of visionary art present at Raindance 2013 (artist unknown).

Note how the headdress (suggesting indigeneity) combines with deconstructive
geometrical patterns. Photo: Bryan Schmidt (2013).
and other clothing inspired by representations of Native Americans; they

integrated objects like Māori poi into their dance practices and instruments
like the didgeridoo into cut-and-paste water rites or dancefloor rituals.
Transformational festivals, as described by Leung, are built on a premise
of fostering a new mode of spirituality discovered through combining the
reperformance or redeployment of ‘ancient’ ritual elements alongside the
spectacle firepower provided by contemporary visual, aural and chemical
technologies; this leads, potentially, to what he calls ‘reindigenization’,
an attempt to simultaneously ‘reconnect with the earth … with our own
indigenous nature’, and to explore ‘a re-encounter [with] representatives of
indigenous communities’ (Festival Fire 2013).
Leung’s concept of reindigenization proposes a fundamental mutability
in terms of the positionality of the predominantly white, middle-class
population that attends transformational festivals. It aligns with what
Arun Saldanha has discussed as the white ethico-political project of
psychedelics aimed at transcending the geohistorical body (2007: 15).
Seen thus, transformation here posits an evacuation of one’s hegemonic
identity to enter a primal, fluid state of being; participants then reconstitute
their identities, picking and choosing from a range of cultural practices
that may or may not align with their former positionality. Participants
come together at transformational festivals to form temporary (white)
enclaves dedicated, at least in part, to rearticulating the self as malleable,

adaptable and performative, able to perceive and indeed become that
which they see as the antithesis and casualty of global modernity: the
indigenous Other.
Despite what I take to be the genuinely respectful intentions of
festivalgoers,11 the dangers of such a project should be immediately
apparent. The relative absence of indigenous bodies at events like Raindance
speaks particularly loudly, coinciding with contemporary controversies
that display the lack of control indigenous groups have over their own
representation.12 The ability to view indigeneity as a mutable category that
can be tried on, played with, cast aside or altered if desired undoubtedly
speaks to the privileged position many festivalgoers occupy within the US
racial and cultural hierarchy. It both displays and refortifies white supremacy
by characterizing whiteness as neutral, unmarked, a blank slate. Furthermore,
the appropriation of religious and cultural practices for the purposes of
reinvigorating the identities of festivalgoers threatens to drain these practices
of their specificity, historical significance and symbolic power. It redeploys them
as forms of identity capital in a neoliberal marketplace that does not privilege
those from whom the practices were mined, but rather, homo economicus, the
rational figure of political modernity that can detach from the web of cultural
associations that sustain community and resistance (Werry 2011: 185).
There is reason to suggest that some of these issues are also familiar to
patrons and organizers of transformational festivals themselves: one such
event, Lightning in a Bottle, banned headdresses and other explicit Native
American mimicry in 2014; others are following suit, triggering widespread
debate within the community about issues of cultural appropriation.
Discussing ‘reindigenization’, Leung himself acknowledges the danger of
reifying exploitive behaviours and explores how to bridge the gap between
indigenous and contemporary neo-tribal communities ‘in a good way,
in [a] right relationship[, in] a way that is not replaying the dynamics of
colonialism, but is attempting to heal those dynamics’ (Festival Fire 2013).
He thus outlines at least a personal consciousness of the ease with which
projects that emphasize such cultural remixing (particularly as enacted
by relatively privileged persons within the hegemonic order) can slip into
a reiteration of neo-colonial marginalization practices even if, outwardly
at least, it is precisely the racial/gender/class politics of white colonial
modernity from which transformational festival participants attempt to
disassociate.
11
Graham St John suggests that although many deployments of Native American imagery in
festival settings falls into the camp of solipsistic neoprimitivism, ‘some exemplify genuine efforts
to advance change in the wake of the recognition of crises of self and globe, or contextualize
respectful exchanges involving collaborative intercultural performances’ (2013: 191).
12
For example, in the United States the naming of sports teams like the Washington Redskins or
the Golden State Warriors remains a major terrain of struggle for Native American communities.
Conclusion
Bourriaud wrote Relational Aesthetics primarily to understand shifts in the
1990s European gallery art scene, and it is worth questioning the need to reach
into such a different disciplinary space to theorize an event like Raindance.
Despite festival culture becoming a major artistic trendsetter for society at
large, it often gets dismissively framed as a hedonistic party scene rather than
a critical space for creative identity-making or ethico-political development.
As just one small example, a 2015 New York Times article discusses how the
Wassaic Project, a New York-based artist residency, developed an accompanying
festival event that aimed to mimic the ‘spirit’ of music festival culture; in the
article, organizer Bowie Zunino described a desire to draw from music festival
culture in order to build an event with a sense of generosity and sociality, but
‘where the art wasn’t hippy stuff but serious contemporary art’ (Green 2015).
While Zunino values the affective ties that arise within music festivals, he
effortlessly dismisses the artistic practice that, as I have argued, helps generate
this communal cohesion. Discussing Raindance as relational art, I hope, does
work to counter similar characterizations of festival culture as lowbrow and
unserious, a frou-frou hobby that contrasts with thoughtful contemporary
art practice. Perspectives like Zunino’s occlude the creativity, collaboration
and discipline that enable events like Raindance – from organizers and
participants alike. The lens of relational aesthetics opens up festival culture
to modes of analysis that take seriously its affective power and ethical
imperatives. It reveals the technologies by which boutique events generate a
sense of belonging and inspiration without access to the resources of larger
festivals. While I have sought to refute the teleological, liberatory trope seen in
Bourriaud’s writing and the discourse surrounding transformational festivals,
placing the two in conversation makes visible the participatory technologies
that operate at events like Raindance and potentially reify fundamental values
of Western liberalism.
Relational art in the context of the Raindance Campout does indeed
produce real transformations that bind participants together and
encourage alternative social practice, but transformation is never neutral.
It occurs within the discursive frame that circumscribes it and travels along
multiple axes, rather than a single, positivist continuum. The progressive
energy participants, organizers and spokespeople invest in the concept of
‘transformation’ naturalizes such a continuum and abstracts contradictory
critical axes: the presence of the material culture, rituals and representational
practices of diverse peoples substitutes for actual multicultural diversity;
the impact fee’s assurance of sustainability and proper stewardship of the
land obscure the unsustainable consumption patterns that participants
engage in while at the festival; and alternative economic practices among
a tiny population supplant systemic critique. This is not to call out the
Raindance Campout for ‘bad politics’, but merely to indicate that it has
politics; politics that cannot be uncritically contrasted to an imagined

normative ‘mainstream’. Neither relational aesthetics, nor a boutique size,
nor an ethical model assures progressivism. The point is not to moralize but
to advocate for reflexivity among participants, organizers and scholars in
determining where transformational festival culture’s ethical imperatives lie.
The dizzying array of rituals, artistic practices, costumes, dancing bodies,
finely constructed spaces – all simultaneously present in the spellbinding
crucible of a natural setting – should not prevent us from questioning what
happens when the amps are finally turned off and the temporary community
dispersed. Intensity of experience, the novelty of creative invention and
the richness of sociality should prod us to ask the crucial question: ‘What
exactly have I signed up for here?’
Acknowledgements
Many thanks to Arun Saldanha for helping me set off on this project and to
Rita Kompelmakher for attending Raindance with me and providing much
needed feedback on my writing and observations.
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CHAPTER FIVE
Harm Reduction
or Psychedelic Support?
Caring for Drug-Related Crises
at Transformational Festivals
Deirdre Ruane
5 August 2014, Boom Festival, Portugal. Late afternoon. Now that the
Sacred Fire has been lit, the first beats from the Dance Temple roll across
the hillside to meet the onrushing crowd. The heat is punishing, but
inside the Temple we find shade and cool falling mist. Faces turn up to
receive it. It has finally begun. Many of the crowd, swept up in the moment,
drop acid – or a blue fractal blotter they think is acid – round about now,
and by midnight psychedelic support space Kosmicare is having its busiest
night on record.
Within the compound, near the centre of the site, a full team of sitters and
others not on shift, pulled in to help, are hard at work. I am with a young
Irishman who thinks he is in hell. It is like psychedelic A&E: visitors are
arriving on foot and in jeeps or buggies, alone or brought by friends, medics
or security. The list on the whiteboard by the front desk, where visitors are
checked in and their detailed admission forms are filled in, gets longer and
longer. Most of them are having classic LSD trips: a familiar sequence of
dissolution and gradual reassembling. But by morning we are wondering

why a few just do not seem to be coming down.
That is when people from CheckIn – the government-endorsed drug
checking lab that has been running all night by the main dancefloor – arrive
with their detailed findings and an explanation. What the visitors thought
was LSD is in fact DOx, a family of psychedelic amphetamines with twenty-
five to thirty-six hour effects. As we formulate a strategy for visitors on
DOx, CheckIn are posting warning signs all over the site.
Burn Night, 31 August 2014, Burning Man, Nevada, USA. After
watching The Most Stubborn Man in the history of Burns finally collapse,
I arrive on shift at the Zendo ‘psych support’ space at 2:00 am. Inside it is
warmly lit, with piles of blankets on raised sleeping platforms, and skilled
therapists stand ready to assist. But it is buried down a dark side street
with minimal footfall, out past 2.30 and E, and because of the hostile
nature of Nevada law enforcement, its advertising has been evasive and
ambiguous. It is almost empty. Some roamers are being dispatched to the
biggest and loudest dance camps, to tell people about the Zendo and offer
to sit with anyone they find having a crisis. They will find no one who
admits to this.
The shift leader quietly points me towards a guy sitting cross-legged on
the floor, swaying and moving his hands fluidly through the air. After we
have talked for a while, I ask him what he took. He closes up and pulls
away. ‘I don’t see why I should tell you that’, he says, ‘it’s irrelevant to my
personal quest’.
26 July 2014, Secret Garden Party, UK. Kosmicare UK (KCUK) is tucked
away in the most remote corner of the festival site, far from the medical
and welfare tents, behind a fairground swing ride that pumps out disco.
We are expecting a quiet shift. Then a dozen or so late-teenage boys and
girls arrive, supporting a terrified girl who is convinced the security guards
intend to strip-search her. They have all taken what they think is MDMA.
One of the volunteers, a chemist, examines their baggie and decides that it
is pentedrone, a recently synthesized cathinone associated with compulsive
binges and stimulant psychosis. He is almost right – months later, results
from a postal testing service confirm that it is pentedrone’s closest relative,
alpha-PVP – but at the time there’s no way to check. Meanwhile I watch
the visitors follow their friend down into the same pit of paranoia: black
magic, conspiracy, harassment, sexual violence, incontinence and shame.
The three of us on shift work flat-out long into the night. Sleep will resolve
the problem, but they think we are part of the conspiracy and they will not
sleep here until we have won their trust.
The next afternoon I head over to medical and welfare. We were told they
had been briefed, but the ones on duty have not heard of us. There have been
hundreds of cases like the ones we had, distressed and paranoid in eerily
HARM REDUCTION OR PSYCHEDELIC SUPPORT? 117
similar ways. But the brusque nurse on the triage desk will not believe that
it is not MDMA. She insists its ‘the bad batch the police told us about’; so
pure that people are overdosing. I try to tell her that the effects we saw were
nothing like MDMA overdose, and anyway there is bound to be much more
than one bad batch at a festival this size – but she is busy, and no longer
listening.
Many of the electronic dance music events known as ‘transformational
festivals’ provide psychedelic support spaces. Staffed by volunteers,
members of the transformational festival community known as ‘sitters’,
these spaces offer refuge and compassionate care to festivalgoers undergoing
difficult drug experiences. The purpose of the space is to assist participants
towards the resolution of these experiences, while alleviating the burden of
psychedelic and other drug-induced crises for on-site medics, who are often
ill equipped to handle such cases. Many of the support workers subscribe
to a core value within psychedelic culture discourse: that psychedelics can
aid personal growth if their use is handled appropriately, and relatedly,
that difficult psychedelic experiences can lead to valuable psychological
breakthroughs.
The work of the care spaces is sometimes referred to as ‘psychedelic harm
reduction’, a somewhat contentious phrase. Harm reduction is a paradigm
for the care of drug users that offers an alternative to approaches based on
criminalization and abstinence, seeking to reduce the harm rather than the
use of drugs. Early harm reduction was peer-driven, originating with an
advocacy group of Dutch heroin addicts. However, although the work of
peer-based harm reduction initiatives continues, a more medicalized form of
harm reduction has come to dominate the field. This approach is associated
with neoliberal views of drugs, drug users, the self and the nature of the
relationship between drugs workers and those they support.
Engaging with this mainstream harm reduction paradigm can cause
difficulties for psychedelic support workers. The paradigm is in many
ways incompatible with the discourse of psychedelic culture, as expressed
in the ideologies of the transformational festival. However, in the context
of international drug prohibition, the support projects must endorse the
values of harm reduction in order to gain access to events, visibility to
festivalgoers and integration with other support staff. Points of conflict
between the psychedelic and harm reduction discourses create tensions
both within the support organizations and in their relations with on-site
medics, security guards, festival organizers and the police. This complex
situation is further impacted by the effects of national and local drug
policy.
This chapter considers how psychedelic support workers negotiate
this discourse dichotomy in the course of caregiving, within differing
national and local drug policy climates. Along with relevant literature, it
draws upon ethnographic fieldwork conducted throughout the summer

of 2014 in which I volunteered as a sitter with three psychedelic support
organisations: KCUK (UK), the Zendo Project (United States) and
Kosmicare (Portugal). Participant observation was carried out at seven
festivals in three countries with contrasting legal climates (the UK, the
United States and Portugal), and was supplemented by in-depth interviews
with nineteen support workers. Early findings suggest that mainstream
harm reduction discourses may be a poor fit for psychedelics and that risks
inherent in their adoption by festival support spaces, such as abjection of
drug users in difficulty, may create a trust-damaging divide between users
and workers.
First, the scene must be set. Transformational festivals have a distinctive
culture that sets them apart from other electronic dance music festivals,
focusing on self-transformation and community-building through dance,
group ritual and co-creativity. Psychedelic support plays an important role
in this ‘transformation’. The following section draws upon both scholarly
and scene writing, along with my own observations during fieldwork, to
provide a brief introduction to the transformational festival.
FIGURE 5.1 The Sacred Fire, Boom 2014. Photo: Deirdre Ruane.

Transformational festivals, identity and

the collective
Transformational festivals are an emerging category of events with some or
all of the following features: electronic dance music, including psychedelic
dance music; visionary art; an emphasis on creative participation rather than
spectatorship; leave-no-trace or permaculture-based operating principles;
seminars, workshops and lectures; green politics and/or social activism; and
a remit of personal and social transformation (Krasnow 2012), along with
widespread use of psychedelics and group ritual. Leung (2010) positions the
American and Canadian West Coast as the current centre of the movement,
though transformational festivals can be found worldwide.
Several cultural currents converge in the transformational festival, a non-
exhaustive account of which will be given here. One is Burning Man, at
which a temporary community known as Black Rock City is built in the
Nevada desert for a week each year. Burning Man began as an anarcho-punk
event emphasising art, ritual and co-creativity. Dance music camps arrived
later, becoming integral to the event (Jones 2011: 84–88). Another influence
on the transformational festival was the Goatrance movement, which was
seeded in the late 1960s with ‘spontaneous dance jams’ on the beaches of
Goa mounted by ‘freaks’ who had settled there. By the 1970s, these events
had evolved into full-moon dance gatherings (St John 2012: 34–35). As the
Goa scene itself declined in the 1990s and 2000s, psychedelic events inspired
by the Goa aesthetic and philosophy began to spring up worldwide, such as
Boom, Ozora and Envision festivals. In the UK, the transformational festival
scene that supports events like Sunrise Celebration, Waveform and Alchemy
is rooted in the Free Festival/New Age Traveller movement of the 1970s,
and was further fuelled by 1980s–1990s UK rave and its legendary outdoor
events (Dearling 2012: 14). Migrating across the Atlantic in the mid-1990s,
rave combined with ‘progressive currents’ on the US West Coast to bring
about a proliferation of transformational festivals there (Leung 2010).
The ‘transformation’ that is said to occur at these events has various
vectors. Social transformation may arise from connections made,
information exchanged and skills learned at events. In constructing festival
spaces, crews and festivalgoers engage in utopics: a form of ‘spatial play’
involving the construction of physical representations of ‘the good society’
(Marin 1984: 6–12; Hetherington 1997: 328). Though these representations
are necessarily temporary and often hotly contested (St John 2013), they
enable the formation of activist networks that can persist on return to the
‘real world’, in areas such as non-market economies (Kozinets 2002: 20–38),
environmentalism (Purdue et al. 1997: 660–64) or use of festival-learned
skills to assist disaster relief efforts (Jones 2011: 176–78).
FIGURE 5.2 Constructing the Temple, Burning Man 2014. Photo: Deirdre Ruane.
Alongside the transformational festival’s utopian social aspirations, and

inextricable from them, is the idea of the transformation of self through
the festival experience and the non-ordinary states of being it facilitates.
Numerous authors, for example, Gilmore (2010: 13), Tramacchi (2000: 206)
and Pike (2011: 158), have framed the festival state by way of Victor Turner’s
theory of liminality (Turner 1969: 95), in which a threshold is crossed into
a ‘betwixt and between’ state where everyday rules and the flow of normal
time are suspended and new social roles can be assumed. However, St
John’s reconfiguration of Turner’s theory (2001) offers a better purchase on
transformational festivals, acknowledging the wild heterogeneity of peak
experiences and the central role of embodiment.
Perhaps the most common image of the collective, embodied spirit of
transformational festivals is that of the dancefloor, on which ego boundaries
are said to dissolve, resulting in ecstatic experiences of communion mediated
by the rhythms of psytrance and other electronic music, and often assisted
by consumption of psychedelics. Duffy et al. (2011: 23) describe how an
‘emotional response of belonging’ arises from communication ‘through
pulse’, such as that engaged in by a dancing crowd moving in synchrony.
As St John (2012: 183) writes, in spaces like the Dance Temple at Boom
Festival ‘the boundaries that separate people from each other and from the
world are subject to liquidation’.
This merging with the collective may involve a temporary suspension of –
or deliberate flight from – everyday identity as a unitary neoliberal subject
(as described by Rose, Barry and Osborne 1996: 41) constantly engaged
in processes of self-monitoring, self-governing and efficiency maximization.
As St John (2012: 116) writes, one becomes ‘unburdened of disciplined,
voluntary modes of subjectivity’. While one is thus unburdened, a different
subjectivity reveals itself. Experiences of selfhood within the space of the
transformational festival are characterized by fluidity, integration with
others and periods of dissolution into group ecstatic states – an experience
that is arguably the driving force behind the transformational festival’s
collectivist, utopic aspirations.
However, the process is not always smooth. As Echenhofer (2012) found,
the phase of dissolution early in a psychedelic experience can be disturbing
and involve an upwelling of difficult emotions. In the right setting, and
especially if support is given, this crisis phase can give way to a ‘healing
catharsis’ (Leung 2010), which resolves into an experience of reintegration,
both in oneself and with the collective. This process is highly valued within
transformational festival culture and seen as an opportunity for growth
(Zendo 2013: 2). Thus, Leung (2010) sees the provision of psychedelic
support as integral to the culture.
In the context of these values, drug consumption preferences in
transformational festival culture differ from those, for instance, at
corporate EDM events. Informal surveys of festivalgoers during
fieldwork in the UK and Portugal, alongside data from drug checking
facilities, allowed me to build up a picture of supply and demand based
on respondents’ stated preferences and on which substances they had
noticed were being sold within the festival. ‘Classic’ psychedelics, such as
LSD, mushrooms and forms of DMT such as the smoking blend changa,
are the most highly valued, and along with MDMA, the most sought after.
Cannabis is ubiquitous, and lesser-known synthetic psychedelics such as
the 2C family are also popular. Stimulants such as speed and mephedrone
are present, but they are less popular than at more-corporate events.
Ketamine provokes widespread ambivalence: many profess to dislike
it but it is nonetheless widely used. Most ‘hard’ drugs such as heroin
and crack – though not cocaine, at least not unanimously – are shunned
by transformational festivalgoers, many of whom distance themselves
emphatically from users of addictive drugs. Finally, novel psychoactive
substances (NPS), such as the DOx family, NBOMe and alpha-PVP, are
rarely sought or sold explicitly; rather, they tend to be sold as one of
the ‘classics’. Successive waves of bans on psychoactive substances make
the ongoing synthesis or rediscovery of still-legal NPS an attractive
proposition for the drug trade. NPS have little history of human use and
thus carry unknown risks.
Several key aspects of psychedelic culture discourse will be foregrounded
in this analysis, as they are central to the work of psychedelic support
projects. These are views of the self; views of drug use and its value;
attitudes to drug users and their relationship with support workers; and
conceptions of the central purpose of the support space. The self is here
regarded as transpersonal, holistic, part of a collective, and capable of
dissolving and reforming, with a porous self–other boundary. In theory,
drug users undergoing intense altered states are seen as engaged in valuable
internal processes, and thus deserving of respect (Zendo 2013: 2). As fellow
scene members, support workers are considered to be the peers and equals
of those they support. Finally, the facilitation of potentially beneficial
psychedelic processes with the aim of personal growth is the core purpose
of the support space. As we shall see, each of these points contrasts sharply
with mainstream harm reduction discourse.
The next section provides a brief introduction to the support projects,
their work within the transformational festival milieu and the differing
pressures of local and national drug policy upon them. There is little
scholarship concerning the projects as yet, so this account rests upon
memoirs of and conversations with support workers, along with my own
field observations.
Ground crew: Psychedelic support projects

at work
Psychedelic support volunteers are drawn from festival culture. Many are
psychologists, psychiatrists, counsellors and other mental health professionals;
others are community drugs workers; some simply have extensive experience
with psychedelics. Their remit of care covers all difficult drug experiences for
which medical attention is not required. While most volunteers work within
the care space, mobile teams, such as the Vibe Patrol at Boom or the Zendo
Roamers at Burning Man, circulate on dancefloors to ‘keep the vibe high’,
providing primary care, water, reassurance and sometimes transport to the
care space.
The first step in a visitor’s care is establishing whether they require
medical attention, referring them to medical staff if this is the case. If not,
care strategies are shaped by what the visitor is believed to have taken, and
thus the profile and estimated duration of the effects. For those deemed to
be undergoing a psychedelic crisis arising from a normal dosage of a well-
known substance, care focuses on the facilitation of the visitor’s internal
process. It may start with the provision of basic comforts such as blankets,
water or tea and a private, low-stimulus space if desired. Subsequently,
sitters remain with visitors, talking, listening or simply sitting quietly
with the visitor as desired. The aim is to create an atmosphere of safety
in which the visitor feels able to confront and process difficult emotions.
In transformational festival culture, dance is seen as a powerful catalyst of

this internal work. Thus, some care techniques use movement and dance
to help visitors towards catharsis. Zendo training includes a segment on
‘bodywork’ techniques, which encourage the visitor to focus on and amplify
involuntary movements, and Kosmicare sometimes features a separate space
in which visitors can dance if desired.
Most such cases resolve without problems given support, comfort and
time. However, many others are less predictable. Visitors may have taken
too much of one substance or an incompatible combination of several; been
unwittingly spiked; be suffering from difficult physical conditions, lack of
food or sleep; or been sold a more harmful substance than the one they
expected. Care of these cases focuses on the minimization of health impacts.
Visitors are monitored closely and may be medicated if their case does not
seem to be resolving, though this is avoided where possible. In rare cases,
support workers may decide to keep visitors within the compound if they
are thought to be a risk to themselves or others.
Formulating a care strategy with the right balance of process facilitation
and damage control is easier in policy climates where drug checking is
possible. Where checking is prohibited, support staff must rely on
guesswork and experience. Experience, however, is inadequate in the
face of the constant influx of NPS being sold as more-familiar drugs.
Punitive climates, which lack checking facilities and where transactions
must be performed hastily and surreptitiously to avoid the police, create
favourable conditions for the sale of partly or wholly adulterated drugs,
recalling Rhodes’ (2009) characterization of governments as ‘agents of
harm production’.
Some of the roots of psychedelic support lie in the Free Festival
movement of the 1970s in the UK, which saw the setup of Festival Aid,
later Festival Welfare Services, a government-funded organization linked
to drugs charity Release and run by members of the Traveller movement
(Dearling 2012: 65–80). Others spring from Goa, where Karin Silenzi de
Stagni, now the manager of KCUK, set up a popular ‘nest’ space at beach
parties in the late 1990s (De Stagni 2013). Elsewhere, in 2001, MAPS
– the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies – began to
provide support at US festivals like Burning Man. A few years later, taking
advantage of decriminalization in Portugal, Portuguese government agency
The Service for Intervention in Addictive Behaviors and Dependencies
(SICAD) invited MAPS to set up Kosmicare at Boom (Emerson et al. 2014:
34), inspiring De Stagni to start a UK branch. Other projects include Daath
Psy-Help in Hungary (Móró and Rácz 2013: 1), Alice Project and Eclipse
in Germany and mobile drug checking services like Spain’s Energy Control
and Austria’s CheckIt!, which provide some psychedelic support as an
adjunct to their lab work. However, this paper focuses on Kosmicare, the
Zendo Project (also a MAPS initiative) and KCUK.
Kosmicare
Portuguese project Kosmicare had approximately sixty volunteers, many
of whom were mental health professionals, at Boom festival in 2014.
Volunteers work in shifts of six with experienced shift leaders and a medical
team on hand. Their compound, whose structures are provided by the
festival, is central and well publicized on maps and brochures. They share
detailed data with CheckIn, a front-of-house (that is, providing feedback to
users on a short timescale) drug checking laboratory with state-of-the-art
testing facilities located beside the Dance Temple, Boom’s central dance
floor.
The Portuguese policy environment is perhaps the most liberal in the
world. In 2001, as documented by Hughes and Stevens (2010: 1001–
18), possession of a small amount of any illicit drug was changed from
a criminal offence to an administrative one and a battery of government-
sponsored harm reduction programs were rolled out. Medicalization was
at the core of the approach, with drug-use portrayed as a public health
issue. MAPS and SICAD launched Kosmicare at Boom the following year
(Emerson et al. 2014: 34). While psychedelic support projects in many other
countries struggle to justify their existence to the authorities, Kosmicare is
heartily endorsed by the Portuguese government, and Boom organizers give
Kosmicare unprecedented visibility and publicity on-site.
However, within this more relaxed policy climate, some tensions still
arise between the psychedelic discourse to which the majority of support
workers subscribe and the medicalized, harm-reduction-based approach of
Portuguese drug policy. These mostly concern moves towards formalization
of the care space and will be explored later.
The Zendo Project

In the United States, MAPS’ current psychedelic support project is the Zendo.
Managed by a team of therapists, with about eighty volunteers, it operates at
events in the United States and Costa Rica, and relies on crowdfunding and
donations. The Zendo is notable for its intent to act as a ‘teaching hospital’
for psychedelic therapists, in hopes that the law will eventually change to
permit this type of therapy (Emerson et al. 2014: 34). However, such a
change still seems a remote possibility under US drug policy. The provision
of harm reduction facilities is illegal for event organizers under the RAVE
Act of 2003, as this is considered to be ‘encouraging the use of drugs’ (Blake
2015). Policy in Nevada, Burning Man’s home state, is especially punitive;
for example, it is a felony to possess a drug checking kit. As Emerson et al.
(2014: 34) state, a previous MAPS project worked with the Black Rock
Rangers – Burning Man’s own community safety group – from 2003 to
FIGURE 5.3 The Zendo setup at Burning Man 2014. Photo: Deirdre Ruane.
2008, but was forced to shut down as harm reduction became increasingly
criminalized; today, the Zendo is not connected with the organizers of
Burning Man. Zendo workers must, therefore, find an accommodation
between the values of psychedelic discourse and the representatives of a
mainstream culture who regard harm reduction as dangerously radical.
Another feature of the US festival landscape is the typically heavy police
presence, including many undercover police. Warnings not to talk about
drugs with anyone outside one’s own camp are passed around Burning Man
and broadcast on the city radio station BMIR. As a result, silences attend both
sides of the relationship between the Zendo and those it seeks to support.
Since open provision of harm reduction at events can be problematic in
the US policy climate, the Zendo takes the precaution of advertising as
‘psych support’ rather than psychedelic support. Furthermore, visitors and
potential visitors are reluctant to discuss their drug consumption due to the
climate of distrust arising from policing strategies. This reticence and the
absence of checking facilities complicates the processes of formulating care
strategies and predicting how cases will progress.
Possibly due to the Zendo’s low profile, its rates of visitor participation
tend to be much lower than those of Kosmicare at Boom, though the
event is considerably larger (70,000 compared to Boom’s 40,000 in 2014).

In 2014, the Zendo was moved from its previous central placement to a
remote location with its case total for the week falling by more than half.
For comparison, Kosmicare at Boom 2014 had just short of 400 cases.
While there are other possible explanations for this dramatic disparity,
such as Burning Man’s ethos of self-reliance or its structure of close-knit,
supportive camps, the possibility cannot be dismissed that a significant
number of Burners who might have benefited from the help of the Zendo
may have been afraid to ask, unaware of the Zendo or unable to find it.
Kosmicare UK
More informal and emphatically peer-based compared with the Portuguese
organization, KCUK is linked with it in name only, though many KCUK
volunteers have also worked at Boom. The core identity of most KCUK
volunteers is that of the experienced psychedelic user supporting those
with less experience, though some are also therapists. The organization is
smaller in scale than others, running on donations from visitors and small
contributions towards expenses by event organizers. The tents and field
kitchen are the managers’ own, shifts of two or three are fielded and there
is no medical presence on staff. Of the three groups in this study, KCUK are
the most open about their support of the psychedelic discourse.
This openness can cause problems in a policy climate that appears to
be growing more punitive. Though the medicalization approach to harm
reduction was pioneered in the UK reaching a peak of popularity there
during the New Labour years (1997–2010), the subsequent Conservative/
Liberal Democrat government reinstated supply and demand eradication
as its central approach (HM Government 2010). At festivals, front-
of-house drug checking is not possible under UK law at the time of
writing. Psychedelic support is not illegal but organizers of larger events,
under the supervision of local councils and police, are wary of giving
any indication that they are condoning drug use. In recent years, many
UK festivals have been subject to last-minute, unaffordable policing
fee increases, which in most cases amount to a de facto shutdown (for
one example, see Resident Advisor 2010). Thus, even if KCUK gains
admittance to these events, their presence may go unacknowledged and
unpublicized by the organizers, and problems often occur with visibility,
infrastructure supply and integration – or lack of – with other on-site
support services.
Each of the three organizations has been shaped by the policy climate
within which it operates. All experience conflicts and dissonances between
the values of transformational festival culture and the local policy climate.
In the more punitive regimes, the organizations’ values run counter to policy
and to prevailing opinion. If made explicit, these conflicts can result in the
abrupt termination of their work at the events.
Despite these difficulties, all three groups, and psychedelic support as a
movement, appear to be undergoing a spurt of growth and formalization.
Kosmicare have begun to release quantitative findings on the efficacy of
their intervention (Carvalho et al. 2014). An international collaboration
between support workers, the Manual of Psychedelic Support, has codified
many formerly fluid and ad-hoc working practices (Oak et al. 2015). KCUK
is currently applying for charity status. The support groups’ methods,
results and values, which formerly tended to be implicit and shared among
practitioners, are becoming increasingly explicit, codified and public.
The groups are facing choices about the discourses and contexts they will
use to frame this information.
One possible frame is that of harm reduction. It is now the core paradigm
in Portugal, with a history of political influence in Australia and the UK
(O’Malley 2002: 280) and for a short time in the United States (Marlatt
1996: 785). As such, it can be seen as providing a quasi-respectable banner
behind which drug policy reformers can rally. However, harm reduction is
a concept freighted with assumptions and axioms that conflict with those
of psychedelic culture, or exacerbate pre-existing problems within the
culture. The following section examines the academic literature on harm
reduction and considers its origins, in order to understand the implications
for psychedelic support projects and the possible risks inherent in adopting
harm reduction as their dominant discourse.
Harm reduction: A brief history of an idea

Harm reduction began as an advocacy movement by a group of Dutch
heroin users, the ‘Junkiebond’, who first went public at the beginning of
the 1980s (Blok 2008). The movement set out to offer an alternative to the
then popular approaches to drug use: attempts at supply and/or demand
eradication, and ‘abstentionism’ or use reduction. Instead, this approach
focused on the reduction of ‘risk behaviours’ such as the sharing of needles.
The original approach was pragmatic and had peer-based services at
its heart, on the basis that ‘drug users themselves know best what their
problems are’ (Wijngaart 1991, cited in Marlatt 1996: 784) – this is now
known as the ‘Dutch model’. Marlatt (1996: 785) describes an awareness,
among early US harm reduction advocates, that drug use transpired in a
complex social context and that marginalization and inequality contributed
to both the likelihood of drug use and the harm arising from it.
However, the concept mutated throughout the 1990s as it was adopted in
other countries, losing many of its progressive aspects. The brief enthusiasm
for the approach in the United States swung back towards a more punitive
neoconservatism. The emerging ‘UK model’ replaced the focus on peer

support with medicalization. Awareness of the social context of drug use
receded, replaced by a more neoliberal view of the drug user in which use
was seen as merely a matter of free, individual choice (O’Malley 2002: 280),
isolated from social issues and problems, and addiction was perceived as a
‘disease of the will’ (Valverde 1998).
Despite attempts to uproot or reconceptualize this approach, the
neoliberal view of the self remains implicit to harm reduction rhetoric and
practice. Delineated vividly by Rose, Barry and Osborne (1996: 44), the
neoliberal subject is a rational, choice-making individual whose ostensibly
free choices and projects of self-government and self-improvement are in
fact manifestations of internalized microprocesses of power that enable
those in authority to govern ‘at a distance’. Rather than being seen as part of
a community, neoliberal subjects are entrepreneurial and competitive. This
view of the self has various implications for harm reduction: dislocation of
the user from their community or society; overemphasis on rationality at the
expense of pleasure (Moore 2008); and the portrayal of the addict (and by
extension, drug users in general) as one who has misused their free will by
making a bad – that is, irrational and irresponsible – choice.
Thus, within policy and practice, drug users became increasingly
demonized. Moving further from the ‘Dutch model’, a deep divide developed
between drugs workers and users, although involvement of users in their
own treatment is still a nominal goal (Onsia 2014). Concepts of harm
shifted, foregrounding harm done by drug users to communities through
crime (Hunt and Stevens 2004: 334–35).
This shifting concept of harm has faced sustained critique recently. It has
been said to lack an evidence base (Nutt, King and Phillips 2010: 1564),
and to neglect large-scale harm caused by government agencies and policies
(Rhodes 2009: 196). Further, regarding psychedelics, critics such as Tupper
(2008: 297–303), Emerson et al. (2014: 28) and Tennison (2012: 1–12)
take issue with the focus on harm – which they consider to be relatively
minimal – at the expense of the therapeutic and social benefits psychedelics
could provide. This view is shared by many support workers.
Thus, harm reduction discourse may be something of a poisoned chalice
for the psychedelic support movement. The benefits that the discourse can
confer in terms of respectability and legitimacy may not compensate for the
difficulties of attempting to reconcile the values of transformational festival
culture and harm reduction. The communal, fluid view of ‘self’ and ‘other’
within the transformational festival contrasts with the conception of self in
harm reduction discourse: isolated and competitive, within a model where
loss of self-mastery constitutes failure and weakness. Similarly, views of
drug users as potentially engaged in valuable practices, and deserving of
respect, conflict with mainstream portrayals as abject, criminal and will-
impaired. While the drugs of choice in transformational festival culture
are predominantly psychedelics (valued as cognitive tools or ‘teachers’)

and recreational drugs that facilitate dancing, the underlying assumptions
of harm reduction discourse are shaped by heroin and other highly
addictive substances. Finally, peer support is integral to care initiatives at
transformational festivals; Leung (2010) portrays care spaces as developing
organically from practices of informal care by ‘strangers and friends’ within
the festival. Mainstream drugs organizations, on the other hand, perceive
support workers as distinct from (and at worst, superior to) current users.
Many of my participants expressed their discontent with the terminology
of harm reduction and were reluctant to use it. Nonetheless, this approach
permeates the world of psychedelic support, leading to explicit and implicit
tensions in areas where the two discourses intersect. The final sections use
fieldwork findings to explore some of these areas.
Open and closed care spaces

Tangible expressions of the two competing discourses, and clashes between
them, can be observed at the physical boundary between care spaces and the
festival. At KCUK, which subscribes more to psychedelic culture discourse
than that of harm reduction, the care space – an outdoor campfire area,
a large army tent for more talkative visitors and a bell tent divided into
private spaces – is designed to present few barriers to entry. KCUK workers
are aware that visitors may feel too shy, wary or ashamed to ask for help
immediately, especially in the context of the UK drug laws where admitting
use can be risky. Thus the open campfire area acts as a low-commitment
stage in the establishment of trust. Space within the bell tent is carefully
managed, but on the whole KCUK’s configuration reflects the psychedelic
discourse of the collective-minded, fluid self and the need for a porous
boundary between visitors and support workers. This approach does have
its disadvantages, in that it can be difficult to keep track of more mobile
visitors and their friends at busy times.
In its earlier iterations, Kosmicare at Boom was similarly open,
incorporating a social space. However as representatives, not only of
psychedelic culture but also of Portugal’s innovative drug policy, since 2010
Kosmicare have been keeping detailed records to measure the efficacy of
their intervention. Each visitor’s mental state is evaluated by their sitter on
arrival and departure, using a form with seventy-five questions. To enable this
monitoring process, the compound has been fenced, with a single entrance
via the front desk, and entry has been restricted to sitters and visitors. Results
to date have been encouraging: ‘Pre-post mental state evaluation showed
statistically significant difference (p<.05) confirming crisis resolution’
(Carvalho et al. 2014: 1). For many volunteers, the research project is a
powerful source of credibility for psychedelic support, part of an increase
in efficiency, which has generally been warmly welcomed and considered

to have made caregiving easier. On the other hand, some had reservations
about the increase in formality, the need for a fence and the complexity of
the assessment forms, changes that they felt had moved the atmosphere of
the space towards that of a medical facility and hindered the caring process.
Kosmicare’s self-auditing project draws upon harm reduction discourse
rather than that of the transformational festival. Auditing is part of the
neoliberal project; increasingly, experts in every institution are required to
provide detailed quantitative evidence that their methods work (Rose, Barry
and Osborne 1996: 44), while for individuals the notion of empowerment
‘recruits people into active self-management’ (Bondi 2005: 504). As we
saw earlier, transformational festivals allow participants to experience
a temporary suspension of their usual identity as a modern competitive
self-monitoring subject – whether on the dancefloor at events like Boom
(St John 2012: 116), through cathartic mass ritual such as the burning
of the Temple at Burning Man (Gilmore 2010: 93), or simply through
immersion in temporary community (Kozinets 2002: 36). Some volunteer
respondents suggested that formalization was seen as an incursion of the
‘real world’, with its monitoring, bureaucracy and efficiency, into festival
space, disrupting this suspension. Others felt the shift to a more medicalized,
monitored care space had restricted the range of experiences afforded by
the space, excluding both recreational use and ‘sacramental’ use (i.e. in a
ceremonial fashion with the intent of spiritual growth). For some of these
respondents, this concern reflected a wider anxiety: they saw medicalization
of psychedelics as a potential threat to transformational festival values,
commodifying the substances and restricting their use to medical contexts,
away from festive crowds and dancefloor. In their view, one discourse had
the potential to erase the other.
Conceptions of use and users

The transformational festival scene distinguishes itself from more-
corporate festivals by its emphasis on personal growth, as opposed to
consumption and hedonism. For many of my respondents, recreational
use practices at the transformational festival are intricately bound up
with therapeutic or sacramental use. One participant said, in relation to
‘wandering’ on psychedelics at Burning Man, ‘…you get a lot of healing
done. A lot of that is not that verbal … people are dancing, moving,
trying to integrate stuff’. For him, dance was associated with recreational
modes of use, but also central to the transformational process. However,
others are more critical of what they see as purely recreational use. A
participant described Boom as ‘a wasted opportunity’ for spiritual
growth, saying there should be more explicit spiritual teachings available
throughout the site and that the festival was ‘devolving … into an escapist,
hedonistic free-for-all’. Another had begun to feel that the loud dance
music at Boom was an impediment to safe psychedelic use, rather than a
catalyst for transformation. It is perhaps inevitable that such diverse value
judgements about different modes of drug use will be made. However,
a few participants went further, to make value judgements about the
types of user – an attitude that meshes with mainstream harm reduction
discourses in potentially damaging ways.
The harm reduction and transformational festival discourses involve
contrasting views of ‘self’ and thus of ‘self-control’. In keeping with the
neoliberal foundations of the discourse, in mainstream harm reduction loss
of self-control tends to be portrayed as a sign of a bad choice that has led to
the impairment of one’s conscious will. At worst, the will-impaired are seen
by drugs workers as deficient in full personhood and without entitlement
to respect. This attitude is linked with the gradual transformation of harm
reduction from a peer-based movement to one in which there is a broad
divide between workers and ‘citizens’ (a term for users), and the culturally
predominant portrayals of users as criminal, irresponsible and dangerous
have been accepted. Interview participants in the UK, and a few elsewhere,
tended to describe on-site medical staff and security as representatives of
this approach, with a hostile, judgemental and patronising attitude towards
drug users in difficulty.
Psychedelic support training sessions propose an alternative view, in
keeping with the more fluid concept of self within psychedelic culture.
Volunteers are encouraged to respect visitors in deeply altered states, which
may indicate valuable internal processes – as one participant said, ‘We
don’t know if they are meeting God’. Respect for visitors is accompanied
by perception of support workers as visitors’ equals. Due to the emphasis
on peer support, trust is established; visitors are thought to feel safer
with ‘a festival person … not a uniform person’, as one participant put it.
Nonetheless, in the comments of a few participants a type of user emerged,
considered to be hedonistic and reckless, who did not seem to receive equal
respect: ‘There will always be stupid people doing stupid things’, was one
position. Sometimes these users were portrayed as outsiders, not in tune
with the values of transformational festival culture.
In this context, it is perhaps unsurprising to see some commentators
within the field of psychedelic support attempting to counter public fears
that the substances are inherently harmful with the idea that harm generally
stems from improper use, or indeed the characteristics of particular users.
In the foreword to The Manual of Psychedelic Support (Oak et al. 2015:
9), Danforth attributes problems with psychedelics to, among other factors,
‘problematic mindset [and] lack of ego strength’. Similarly, Móró and
Rácz (2013: 6) write: ‘Hallucinogenic drug use in a party environment
may occasionally turn into a bad trip, especially for unprepared and non-
experienced persons with an unstable worldview and an irresponsible

attitude toward mind-altering substances’.
A substantial proportion of psychedelic crises and other drug emergencies
at electronic dance music festivals may indeed be associated with lack of
experience, knowledge or preparedness (my observations seemed to support
this). However, emphasising these causes of difficult experiences while
ignoring other possibilities has problematic implications. In keeping with
the damage control view of psychedelic support, this explanation tends to
portray such difficulties as the regrettable mishaps of neophytes rather than
welcome opportunities for growth, which may occur at any point in a user’s
life. This represents a shift away from the ethos of the transformational
festival, to which these experiences are fundamental, in the direction of
mainstream harm reduction.
More concerning, this view of drug-related crisis may result in victim-
blaming: a visitor’s difficulties may be taken as sufficient evidence that the
visitor has acted irresponsibly. Many factors contributing to drug-related
harm at festivals can be seen as systemic and exacerbated by national and
local drug policy, such as the unrestricted use of adulterants, the ongoing
development of new and unpredictable NPS as older drugs are banned,
or the unavailability of checking services to offset these problems. In this
context, explaining difficult psychedelic experience as ‘irresponsible’ appears
consistent with neoliberal ideology in ‘transfer[ring] all responsibility for
well-being back to the individual’ (Harvey 2005: 76). This way of thinking
about drug use may disrupt the bond between visitors to support services
and their sitters by making sitters more open to mainstream harm reduction
discourses, whereby drugs workers are seen as fundamentally separate from
users, who are subjected to othering or abjection. Thus, the strengths of peer
support, in which workers are perceived as equals and trusted by visitors,
could be greatly diminished and some of the transformational potential of
these events impeded.
Conclusion
The discourse of transformational festival culture contrasts in a number of
ways with that of currently popular approaches to harm reduction based
on medicalization and the ‘UK model’. These points of contrast include two
distinct conceptions of self (one holistic and transpersonal, and the other
rational and isolated); different conceptions of psychedelic use (one that
considers a substance as a cognitive tool or teacher, while the other is drawn
from the world of heroin addiction and focused on harm and crisis); and
different approaches to the support of drug users. Within hostile regulatory
climates, the adoption of harm reduction discourses carries less risk for
psychedelic support organizations than openly espousing those of psychedelic
culture. However, the relevance and utility of the harm reduction approach
is limited when applied to psychedelic crises at transformational festivals
and may in fact diminish the ability of support groups to connect with users
and reduce harm in these cases. Nonetheless, the work of support groups
at festivals – drawing on both discourses – provides an ever-growing body
of evidence that standard harm reduction principles are oversimplified. This
work points towards a possible future in which all routes to transformation
remain open.
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CHAPTER SIX
Dancing Outdoors: DiY Ethics

and Democratized Practices
of Well-Being on the UK
Alternative Festival Circuit
Alice O’Grady
Introduction
Dawn breaks onto a cloudless sky and sunlight sweeps across the fields.
Wisps of smoke from last night’s fires curl upwards as the ashes float down
upon empty beer cans, forgotten items of clothing and remnants of half-
eaten meals never to be finished. This is Sunday morning. Two days and
two nights of furious dancing in hot dark tents and cold open fields, the
sky pierced through with green lasers that go on forever and bounce off
blankets of clouds that remind us that autumn is on its way. This is Equinox
and the tribe have come out to celebrate its passing. The freaks and uniques
of Britain have come here to cut loose, to get down and dirty, freewheeling
their way into a temporary outdoor world made of mud, hay bales and
brightly coloured, handmade decorations that adorn the trees and flap in
the breeze creating a salute for dancers who pass by. This is day three of the
festival where the excesses of weekend hedonism become etched on people’s
faces, where walks become staggers as exhaustion takes over and festival
refugees litter the campsite like fallen soldiers. When the bags are packed
and the debris cleared, and as the raggle-taggle collective prepare for re-
entry into the world that lies on the other side of the fence, their faces,
though haggard, tell a story of three days well-lived, outdoors with friends,
where the elements came to join the party and played alongside them.1
Focussing on the UK’s vibrant alternative festival scene, this chapter
examines how traces of the free party movement in the late 1980s continue
to pervade the ethos and aesthetic register of contemporary events. It
considers the potent DiY ethic of the campsite that emerged as a result
of the convergence of travellers with sound systems such as Spiral Tribe,
Exodus and Bedlam. It examines how the aesthetics and ethics of these
rural, grassroots gatherings hark back to a particular moment in British
history and how the sights, sounds and cultures of the current festival circuit
are intimately connected to the histories from which they grew. The chapter
argues for a reading of outdoor space, as experienced within the frame
of the alternative festival, as a locale for the performance of political and
personal freedoms. It asks how the cultural legacy of opposition through
dancing outdoors serves as an expression of democratic culture and as
spatial practice of belonging. The chapter makes explicit the links between
alternative forms of democratic participation and sensations of individual
and collective well-being that arise from outdoor dance experiences. Finally,
it considers the role of rurality in constructing a festival imaginary that
promotes participation, agency and connectivity.
The sights, sounds and cultures of the UK’s current alternative festival
scene have a unique heritage. They spring from a time when music, mobility
and dancing outdoors was seen as a potential threat to law and order by the
authorities and as a potential point of liberation and emancipation by groups
of people committed to self-organization and DiY living. The alternative
festival as it is experienced today has its roots in a specific socio-political
context. As a cultural phenomenon, it belongs to the UK’s rich tradition of
free festivals and countercultural gatherings, and from there developed as
a direct result of the convergence of travellers with sound systems, that is,
mobile networks of artists, musicians and DJs such as Spiral Tribe, Exodus,
Circus Warp, DiY and Bedlam. Scholars of electronic dance music and
alternative culture have defined the raver/traveller alliance as one of the most
potent subcultural crossovers of recent history, paying particular attention
to Glastonbury Festival’s pivotal role of importing all night raving into a
festival context in the late 1980s and early 1990s (Collin 1997; Rietveld
1998; Worthington 2005; St John 2009). Adopting Glastonbury and other
1
The opening passage is transcribed from the author’s field notes, Alchemy Festival,
September 2014.
DANCING OUTDOORS 139
events as critical sites for ‘facilitating an intimate raver/traveller, crusty/

hippy alliance’ (St John 2009: 34), sound systems and techno crews rallied
at that time under the umbrella of DiY culture (McKay 1998). A cultural
hybrid emerged that embodied the libertarian-anarchist principles of Bey’s
Temporary Autonomous Zone (2003).
The actions of those involved and the legislation that came into force
thereafter via the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act (1994), changed the
way collective dance practices were perceived, not only by the authorities, the
media and middle England, but also by those involved in a culture committed
to using open space opportunistically. Since those days of defiance, rebellion
and civil disobedience, gathering outdoors to dance in the fields and
woodlands of the British countryside has been reconfigured. Festivals now
play a central role in the UK’s cultural economy and represent an important
growth industry (Jacobs 2011). Despite this process of commercialization,
festivals belonging to the countercultural heritage described above continue
to prioritize the rural idyll as an indicator of certain values and ethical
choices and use it as a location that offers the possibility of transformation
and growth.
Drawing on the notion of the TAZ as a ‘means of creating an Outside
or true space of resistance to the totality’ (Bey 2003: xi), this chapter offers
an account of the significance of outdoor space in providing what Bey calls
‘the “peak experience” of autonomy’ (2003: x). It contributes to current
discourse on social participation by arguing for a reading of outdoor space,
as experienced within the frame of the alternative festival, as a locale for the
performance of political and personal freedoms. More specifically, it asks
how the cultural legacy of opposition through dancing outdoors serves as an
expression of democratic culture and as spatial practice of belonging. Like
the ‘transformational festivals’ of the West Coast North American tradition
that are explicitly concerned with consciousness awakening, personal growth
and spiritual development (Leung 2010), and exemplified by events such as
Lightning in a Bottle and British Columbia’s Shambhala, rural alternative
dance festivals in the UK promote a transformational agenda but in a
rather different way and for a different purpose. The broad philosophies
of participation, sustainability, responsibility and creative expression are
common to both event types and, to some extent languages, imagery and
aesthetic sensibilities are shared. However, unlike transformational festivals
elsewhere, the UK variant is underscored by the DiY spirit of punk. These
events possess a harder edge and are linked to a period of civil disobedience
that politicized the practice of dancing outdoors. Twenty years on and now
part of the regulated leisure industry, the alternative dance festival in the UK is
still firmly situated within this countercultural lineage and consciously draws
on its aesthetic. At the same time, these events borrow from other traditions
(e.g. garden parties, English fetes, camping trips, wilderness adventures)
in their evocations of the British countryside. Idyllic pastoral settings are
positioned as optimal locations for the events as they offer participants the
possibility of reconnecting with more ‘authentic’ ways of living, which may
lead to some form of personal or social transformation. The alternative rural
festival is configured as a space where participation, and the benefits one may
draw from it, is prioritized and, to a certain extent, romanticized.
The focus of my discussion is to make explicit the links between alternative
forms of democratic participation and well-being, where one arises from and
prompts the other to form a virtuous circle. ‘Well-being’ here is understood
not only as a subjective state that is characterized by happiness, satisfaction
and fulfilment but also as a process, a collective act of what Haworth and
Hart call ‘sense-making’ (2007: 1). In this configuration, well-being is not
simply about how a person feels on an individual basis but how they make
sense of the world through acts of citizenship, engagement and agency.
To explore further the relationship between collective participation and
well-being, the chapter interrogates the value of dancing outdoors as an
articulation of Do It Yourself culture that is perhaps better expressed as
‘Do It Together’. Consciously constructed according to idealistic principles,
contemporary alternative festivals provide the opportunity to imagine how
life might be lived according to a set of values that differ to those of neo-
liberalism. In a world where many cities are in crisis and communities are
in free fall, rural festivals act as temporary places of revelry and radical
conviviality that offer glimpses of different forms of social organization.
This alternative model is framed and perceived as one that aspires to be
more ethical, sustainable, autonomous and inclusive than the day-to-day
experience of industrialized, urban living. Focussing on the outdoor and
natural context of such events, the chapter offers a new reading of festival
experience as an embodied process that connects people to people and
people to place. Braiding the political with the pastoral, the outdoor space of
the alternative festival becomes a place where radical togetherness might be
enacted, albeit on a temporary stage, and as such offers a critical model for
understanding participatory practices across other contexts and locations.
The chapter utilizes data gathered during a period of extended fieldwork
that spanned four festival seasons between 2011 and 2014 and covered
both the north and south of the UK. Taking an ethnographic approach that
included participant observation, interviews and questionnaire surveys, the
work focuses on small-scale events, specifically Alchemy, Bearded Theory,
Waveform, Solfest, Eden and Nozstock festivals.2 Drawing together some of
2
The author’s immersive participation in the festivals as a ticket holder was integral to the research
methodology and used as an intentional strategy for revealing insight into personal well-being.
Each festival was experienced from an ‘inside’ perspective that prioritized first-hand experience
and intuitive reactions to being outdoors. Reflections on her own embodied responses to events
as they unfolded were documented using diaries, notebooks and video in situ at each festival.
This documentation was then analysed and considered in light of interview and questionnaire
material from festivalgoers that was gathered and returned to the author post event.
the more distinctive qualities of the British alternative festival, the chapter
considers how this cultural phenomenon has emerged from an outlawed past
into a sanctioned present and analyses the way in which it might offer the
potential for a re-enactment of community, using Doreen Massey’s concept
of space as the context for our collective ‘becoming’ (2005). Taking an eco-
psychological perspective, it examines the sensations of interconnectedness
that arise from and are associated with collective space-making practices.
It contributes to a growing body of research on alternative festivals that
seeks to better understand countercultural heritage and its relationship
to normative modes of social organization (Hetherington 2000; McKay
2000; Worthington 2005; Partridge 2006; St John 2014). Building on
previous work that examines electronic dance music festivals as alternative
playworlds (O’Grady 2015), the chapter demonstrates how outdoor dance
events contribute to what we might call a ‘festival imaginary’ through
which participants experience positive sensations expressed variously as
spiritual, psychological, physical or social well-being. While one might be
sceptical about the ability of the festivals under consideration to develop a
new politics of participation to challenge, rival or even replace neoliberal
models, it is nevertheless useful to consider the festival as a form of outdoor
discourse that affords participants an immediate sensation of liberation in
combination with a critique of the constraints from which they seek escape.
How the rural setting plays into this dual process of liberation and critique
lies at the heart of this analysis.
The alternative festival in Britain

Britain’s countercultural tradition and the emergence of free festivals are
already well-documented (Aitken 1990; Hetherington 2000; Worthington
2005; Partridge 2006). Free festivals proliferating in the 1970s were
predicated on idealized notions of community, spirituality and authentic
connection to the land (Partridge 2006: 41). They promised an alternative,
utopian model of living that was based on egalitarian ideals. In the late 1980s,
with the explosion of rave culture, these ideals were reconfigured for a new
generation and taken up by sound systems such as Spiral Tribe for whom
a retreat to the outdoors became part of a strategic exodus out of the city
(St John 2009: 41). Partying outdoors became a symbol of freedom and, as
Collin suggests, represented a romanticized philosophy where disinherited
youth may reconnect with nature (1997: 203). In many ways, this paradigm
of rurality as the context for idealized forms of expressive autonomy has
altered very little. Today’s alternative festivals are predominantly located in
rural settings, promise escape from the routines of urbanized daily life and
consciously draw upon a countercultural heritage in which the countryside
is both romanticized and politicized in equal measure.
The term ‘alternative’ is, of course, loaded, and highly contestable. It

does, however, serve as a useful umbrella term to denote practices that
are characterized as oppositional, resistant, marginal and non-conformist.
For the purposes of this chapter, ‘alternative culture’ is used to signify a
rejection of what might be perceived as ‘mainstream’. In festival terms, this
translates into events modelling themselves differently to the large-scale,
highly commercial festivals such as V, Leeds and Reading, Download and
Glastonbury (despite the latter’s status as being largely responsible for giving
birth to alternative festival culture in the UK in the early 1970s3). While
these events demand huge ticket prices and offer stadium-sized experiences
for festivalgoers, alternative festivals4 such as Sunrise Celebration, Bearded
Theory, Eden, Alchemy and Beautiful Days are small by comparison. Events
are framed as grassroots, community-driven occasions that consciously
display a commitment to ethical partying, participation, co-creation and
collective engagement. Generally, alternative festivals rely heavily on the
skills and labour of supporters and contributors who work the festival
as volunteers or in exchange for a ticket. Most events provide a holistic
experience for attendees by hosting workshops, presentations on arts, crafts
and eco-living initiatives, walkabout performances and fire shows, healing
areas, massage tents, yoga classes, organic food and market stalls, as well
as the requisite programme of live musicians and DJs. Typically, there is an
articulation of commitment to sustainability, with green credentials playing
a significant part in the promotion of the event. Advertising costs are kept
low with events relying predominantly on social media, event loyalty and a
single website to facilitate ticket sales.5 Overt branding and sponsorship is
either rejected entirely or kept to an absolute minimum with traders, stall
holders and artists drawn from the local area so that the event benefits the
place and people closest to its gates (Figures 6.1 and 6.2).
Although the alternative festival as a paradigm of socially inclusive
practice and conscientious living is a common trope that permeates many
festival narratives, it is important to remember that they are also messy,
unpredictable, chaotic spaces dedicated to hedonism and excess. Fearing
crime and public disorder, many living near festival sites object to events
3
See George McKay’s seminal book Glastonbury: A Very English Fair (2000) for a full
discussion of this particular event’s history and its relationship to counterculture.
4
Festival nomenclature changes at a rapid rate. Various online festival sites may categorize
festivals as ‘boutique’ or ‘grassroots’ but seldom identify an event as ‘alternative’ in the way
I am using the term in this chapter. Many festivals that would see themselves as subscribing
to some of the ethical and quasi-political concerns of the free party movement, do not even
feature on official listings, preferring to rely on social media networks and word of mouth for
advertising and ticket sales.
5
As it states on the Beautiful Days website for example, ‘Beautiful Days does not advertise and
has no corporate sponsorship or branding and has sold out every year in advance’ (Beautiful
Days 2015).
FIGURE 6.1 Demonstration of blacksmithing at Alchemy Festival, 2014. Photo:

Alice O’Grady.
FIGURE 6.2 Demonstration of woodcarving with chainsaws at Alchemy Festival,

2014. Photo: Alice O’Grady.
taking place on their doorstep. Organizers work hard to maintain good

relations with the surrounding neighbours, paying attention to noise
pollution and traffic issues in order to keep both licensing officials and local
residents happy. Although alternative festivals are part of a well-regulated
industry and the threat to rural communities is minimal, they continue to
pose a challenge to conservative values not least because they allow people
the opportunity to gather en masse, outdoors, in ways they are prevented
from doing so elsewhere.
For some, festivals are temporary interruptions to daily life. They provide
a brief escape into a hedonistic world that gives respite from workday
responsibilities. For others, particularly those who live and work on the
circuit, alternative festival culture is both philosophy and lifestyle. The
scene contains what George McKay calls ‘the gamut of alt.culture’ and
attracts individuals who are drawn to the countryside not only for its
natural beauty but also for its potential as ‘deeply politicised space’ (McKay
2000: 121). It is the environmental nature of this politicized space and the
freedoms it affords that frames the contemporary experience of festival
going. The present cannot be uncoupled from the past. Through intentional
restaging of the countercultural aesthetic, today’s events provide a platform
for the performance, or (re)enactment, of autonomy that not only echoes the
past but also meets the current demand for self-actualization through social
(and socialized) participation and democratic practice.
Outdoor space and the process of becoming

In the early 1990s, amidst the moral panic surrounding the travellers and
the free party movement, occupation of outdoor space by autonomous
groups was seen as a real threat to social order (see Hetherington 2000:
14–17 for full discussion). Performed outdoors and occasionally captured
by the press, expressions of collectivity, autonomy and self-determinacy
were, at this time, destabilizing conventional and restrictive versions of what
constituted home, family and kinship. Both the travellers and the sound
systems that had begun to move rave out of urban locations and into the
countryside, were beginning to imagine new ways in which people might
congregate, live and determine their own leisure practices. These alternative
imaginings became concrete through the occupation and utilization of open
space. Parties, raves, gatherings and free festivals became the focal point
for celebrating alternative living and articulating a multitudinous ‘quest for
freedom’ (St John 2009: 32). Collectives such as Spiral Tribe developed a
brand of ‘techno-spirituality’ that was rooted in the desire to return to a
world where ‘the disinherited could be connected to natural rhythms and
tribal ritual in an open-air dance event’ (2009: 45). With manifestos such as
these in place, Britain’s countryside became the stage for the performance
of autonomy.
With open space at such a premium, Britons’ relationship with the
countryside, steeped in sentimentality and nostalgia, has always been
highly charged. The control of rural space, who regulates it, protects and
manages it, who inhabits, claims and challenges ownership of it remains
a persistent concern. Although large, rural free parties that caused moral
panic in the early 1990s are a cultural phenomenon of the past, the desire
to occupy space autonomously remains. According to Bey, ‘the Temporary
Autonomous Zone appears not just as an historical moment, but also [as]
a psychospiritual state or even existential condition’ (2003: x). He argues
that humans are driven by the need to experience autonomy in cohesive
groups, as he says ‘in real space/time’ (2003: x). It could be argued that
any notion of the Temporary Autonomous Zone (TAZ) has been effectively
deactivated by authorities who have encouraged its incorporation into the
leisure industry as a way of taming it. Alternative festivals look and feel
very much like the free parties and gatherings of the past but are strictly
controlled and regulated spaces that are required to adhere to stringent
health and safety requirements in order to keep their license. However, the
TAZ is much more than mere ‘counter-cultural drop-out-ism’ (Bey 2003:
132). Rather, it is a conscious tactic that requires certain conditions rather
than particular organizational structures in which to flourish and can,
therefore, exist within the frameworks it seeks to oppose.
While the alternative festival may not be a truly autonomous zone
as originally conceived by Bey, it continues to provide a ‘geographical
odorous tactile tasty physical space’ (Bey 2003: x) for the performance
of autonomy. It provides a context in which these performances can
be enacted alongside and with others. As Massey argues, ‘we cannot
“become” … without others. And it is space that provides the necessary
condition for that possibility’ (2005: 56). Massey calls for space to be
recognized as a sphere of possibility that allows for the existence of
multiplicity and plurality. As she argues, ‘space is always in the process
of being made. It is never finished; never closed’ (2005: 9). In occupying
space together and allowing for the interplay of open exchange between
people, process is prioritized. The TAZ becomes a space (or perhaps an
attitude) in which occupants can work through, or rehearse, what it means
to co-exist in a given location. In this analysis, outdoor festival spaces
that embrace the elements of chaos, openness and uncertainty in their
playful, performative and expressive challenge to mainstream culture are,
to adopt Massey’s phrase, ‘creative crucibles for the democratic sphere’
(Massey 2005: 153). Festival publicity, in this instance from Nozstock,
makes explicit the connections between play and participation and uses it
as a framing device and statement of intent:
The festival’s ethos is about bringing play to everyone, in whatever

form it can. Nozstock believes in the value of not only entertaining,
but in participation and contribution. It’s an ever-changing event with
a clear agenda; to invite conversation, interaction and serious recreation
(Nozstock 2015).
The emphasis here is on open interaction through play. There is an invitation

extended to participants that positions them as agents in the production
of the event (Yeganegy 2012). The implication here is that the very act
of participation produces pleasure. In marketing terms, the co-creation
model offers insight into changing consumer trends and the ‘consumption
of experience’ in, for example, ‘boutique festivals’ (Johansson and Toraldo
2015: 5). However, what participation in the alternative festivals included
in my study reveals about identity, identification and psychological
gratification is of greater concern. To make the link between democratic
practices of participation and psychological well-being, it is necessary to
draw upon and braid together a number of concepts, beginning with a
geographical analysis of social networks and agency.
Democratic cultures and the politics of being

outdoors
Over the past decade scholars have begun to approach the question of
democracy from a geographical perspective (Barnett and Low 2004;
Watson 2004). Sophie Watson in her work Cultures of Democracy: Spaces
of Democratic Possibility (2004) offers a critique of Robert Putnam’s
influential book Making Democracy Work (1993) in which he argues
political association and democratic engagement are contingent on relatively
fixed versions of space such as regions, cities and defined geographical
location. Putnam makes the connection between strong networks of civic
engagement through clubs, associations, cooperatives and so on, and formal
democratic participation. He suggests that horizontal networks such as
these are essential forms of social capital. In turn, these networks foster
forms of reciprocity and social trust. Reciprocity and trust then translate
into functioning democracy within the community (Putnam 1993: 172).
Watson, on the other hand, calls for an exploration of ‘democratic cultures’
that may occur within ‘different or less obvious spatial forms’ and that
may be characterized as ‘domestic, interstitial, temporary, or fluid’ (2004:
207). Using youth rave culture as her example, she argues that ‘there may,
in other words, be a spatial reordering of community and social capital
taking place, which at times may not be obvious, which may be shifting
or momentary, and which may even be invisible to all but those involved’
(Watson 2004: 209). Although not exactly invisible, the shifting, temporary
world of the alternative festival is one such place to look for a reordering of
community that is predicated on sociability and conviviality. In the festival
context, the value of social networks as described by Putnam is undeniable.
Indeed, events would not function effectively without them. In line with
Watson’s modelling however, these networks are fluid, not fixed. They are
inherently mobile, more slippery and ultimately contingent. The social
sphere of the small-scale alternative festival, allows groups and individuals
to build bonds over a short, intense period but without formal commitment
(Figure 6.3). Although subject to immediate evaporation after the event,
some of these social bonds are sustained through other mechanisms. A web
of interrelations that is developed and maintained, often through social
media, reformulates and reconfigures groups across and between festivals.
This process involves participants in what Massey might call a dynamic
‘throwntogetherness’ (2005: 181) and invests this version of community
with an innate uncertainty but also lends it openness and vitality.
FIGURE 6.3 Waveform Festival, 2012. Photo: Alice O’Grady.
As Massey argues, fixed notions of community can be reconfigured

through spatial practice. She suggests, ‘spatialities of power can be reordered
through practices which are more egalitarian, less exploitative and more
mutually enabling’ (Massey 1999: 284). Experiencing a sense of community,
albeit fleetingly so, is perhaps one of the great lures of the alternative festival
and, paradoxically, its most potent anti-marketing tool. Putnam argues that
since the 1970s people have been systematically pulled apart from each
other and their communities (2000). This, he claims, presents a real threat
to democracy in action. Although Putnam is offering an analysis of civic
participation in the United States, the point is applicable to most Western
democracies that rely on citizenship, participation and shared experience to
function effectively. Embodied festival practices (camping, eating, drinking,
dancing, and celebrating outdoors) provide temporary respite from the
isolation experienced as a result of the persistent erosion of community.
While traditional notions of community may be crumbling, new forms are
emerging. Festival communities, although temporary, are opportunities
through which some individuals and groups may access the experience
of belonging that is denied to them elsewhere. Trust and belonging,
unsurprisingly, are key indicators of social well-being. The festival campsite
ethic is predicated on cooperation. The tented village is made and unmade
over the course of a weekend by those who inhabit it. This self-built space
requires certain levels of trust and collaboration to function effectively
and, although dissolving at the end of each event, partially meets the needs
of participants to experience what it means to live side-by-side with their
neighbours in co-created space.
As cultural geographer Jen Jack Gieseking and designer William
Mangold suggest, ‘the process of making and remaking places confirms
our agency and responsibility in producing spaces – both material and
imagined – that emphasise equality, justice, and democracy’ (2014: 393).
Adopting the aesthetic register of another era, the alternative festival
emphasizes the Do it Yourself ethic and spirit of communality. Paradigms
of collective action, responsibility and accountability run alongside those
of hedonism, self-gratification and consumption. Whatever the paradoxes
inherent in this reading, the festive event serves as a leveller. It is open to
the elements and all participants are at its mercy. The music is loud; the
dancing is tribal. In this setting, non-hierarchical modes of participation are
prioritized. There is reverence and respect for festival veterans but celebrity
culture is largely rejected. The ethic is one of radical togetherness rather
than strategic separation and division. As Watson points out ‘the free party
movement, provided an entirely different cultural space, one which had to
be fought for, but one which represented a new form of sociality and which
was, arguably, also a democratic space’ (2004: 216). Although the cultural
space of the free party no longer exists in the same way or with the same
potency, it could be argued, that this notion of ‘democratic space’ has been
reconfigured into a new cultural product. As Boltanski and Chiapello argue,
capitalism absorbs aspects of anti-capitalist critiques into itself (2007). The
so called ‘new spirit of capitalism’ is formed out of the critique levelled at
its predecessor, in this instance the rave/traveller model of autonomy and
authenticity and, in broader terms, the ‘artistic critique’ of 1968 that drove
the countercultural movement. In response, the new spirit of capitalism
appeals to values of self-actualization, freedom and community. It adopts
these principles and markets them. To a certain extent, festival events that
situate themselves at the more alternative, radical or transformational end
of the spectrum have been subject to this very process of incorporation.
However, many festivalgoers are savvy and practised consumers of
experience in other parts of their lives. The commodification of ‘authentic’
festival experience does not render the experience meaningless or empty.
On the contrary, participants are able to draw pleasure, satisfaction and
well-being from events that are consciously created and stage-managed as
part of a radical socio-political tradition that puts community, autonomy
and rurality at its heart.
Outdoor space, collective expression

and hedonic experience
As music psychologists Jan Packer and Julie Ballantyne point out, although
there is a wealth of extant research that looks at the positive health
and well-being benefits of engaging with music in a variety of contexts,
there is little research conducted on the psychological benefits of music
in relation to music festivals (2011: 164). Furthermore, there is even less
consideration given to how the outdoor nature of festivals factors into
sensations of subjective well-being. Drawing on theoretical frameworks
from positive psychology, their study identifies the association of four
facets of music festival experience with well-being outcomes. These four
facets include the social experience, the festival atmosphere, the music
experience and separation experience. Each facet intersects and supports
the other producing a range of social, psychological and subjective well-
being outcomes. Although there is some consideration of environment in
relation to the separation experience, particularly how the festival provides
a different setting to that of daily life or is experienced as a ‘time out of time’
(Falassi 1987), that these events generally take place outdoors and ideally,
in the case of alternative festivals, in rural settings of outstanding natural
beauty, is overlooked. This omission is surprising given the significance
of location to the ‘anticipated experience’ of intensified sensation on
offer (Johansson and Toraldo 2015). Appropriating the iconography
of the English pastoral, website publicity alludes to ‘stunning scenery’
(Eden Festival 2015), ‘beautiful grounds’ and ‘woodland areas’ (Bearded
Theory 2015), ‘glorious rolling countryside’ (Kendal Calling 2015) and
‘breathtaking beauty’ (Green Man 2015). Magikana Festival uses perhaps
the most evocative description:
Magikana is located deep in one of the most remote areas of the UK,
where the roads end and the wild Cambrian Mountains begin. The area
is a protected habitat, and outstandingly beautiful with raw welsh
mountaintops and untouched valleys where some of the sources of major
rivers of the UK originate. Here you will find Quartz crystal everywhere,
endless green hills and craggy cliffs, Red Kites flying, otters in the streams,
badgers, foxes, wild ponies and horses, and of course some good ole welsh
sheep. On the hills you will also find standing stones, and old stone circles
and stunning views as far as the eye can see (Magikana 2013) (Figure 6.4).
FIGURE 6.4 Magikana Festival, Wales. Photo: Allana Angus.
Securing remote rural settings for the purposes of festival represents a

geographical marginality that reflects the broader desire to escape into and
occupy the idealized liminal world of the forest (O’Grady 2015). Remote
locations require commitment and effort not only in terms of travelling to
the festival but also necessitate collaboration and cooperation once in situ.
Tactical escape into the countryside for the purposes of social gathering, in
the UK at least, is steeped in a tangled web of nostalgia, sentiment, history
and politics. Participating in contemporary alternative dance festivals
forms part of this ongoing narrative and, for some, underpins the meaning
they ascribe to it. The idea that being connected to nature has positive
outcomes and, in general, makes us feel good may seem intuitive. However,
emerging research on the restorative benefits of natural environments from
the field of ecopsychology (Rosak 1992; Naess 1995; Herzog, Maguire
and Nebel 2003; Hartig and Staats 2006; Kahn and Hasbach 2012) is
providing empirical data that, brought into conversation with that of
cultural ethnographers, sheds new light on the potential significance and
impact of outdoor dance experiences for effective social functioning and
democratization. As Mayer and Frantz argue, increased connection with
nature enlarges one’s self-concept and builds feelings of ‘community,
kinship, embeddedness, and belongingness’ (2004: 512). Furthermore,
experiencing positive emotions through connecting with nature can
promote both hedonic and eudaimonic aspects of well-being (Wolsko and
Lindberg 2013). In other words, the effects are not simply immediately
enjoyable and temporary but have lasting and enduring impact in the form
of offering a sense of social fulfilment and meaning for those involved.
Although festivals are by definition temporary, deriving well-being from
the experience may produce effects that extend beyond the time frame of
the event and into other realms.
Clearly, self-reported accounts of any potential ‘impact’ on well-being
can only provide us with a partial picture of the relationship between
embodied experience and psychological benefit. Nonetheless, the language
participants use in their responses to questions relating to dancing in the
open air at festivals and personal well-being provides some insight into
how they perceive the experience for themselves and how it fits within the
broader context of self-discovery, community and quasi-spiritual practices
of the self as exemplified by transformational festivals with a conscious
transitional agenda.6 When asked whether outdoor festival experiences
contribute to their own sense of well-being, all respondents agreed
positively.7 This was articulated in various ways but included a range of
emotional, physical, social and spiritual benefits. The positive benefits were
described predominantly as facilitating a process of connectivity, both with
other people and the natural environment:
I feel there is a connection between a beat, a movement and the

awareness of the landscape … I feel there is a connect with harmony in
the landscape … and harmony within the music. (1)8
6
Data for this section was gathered through the return of questionnaires handed out at
Alchemy and Bearded Theory festivals in 2014. The questionnaire asked four open questions
and twenty-one responses were returned by email. Anonymity was guaranteed for all
responses. The questions focused on finding out how participants felt about their outdoor
dance experiences, what meaning they ascribed to it and how this contributed to the overall
experience of attending a festival. All participants were over eighteen years of age. Out of
twenty-one participants, five were female.
7
Out of twenty-one respondents only two suggested that dancing outdoors at a festival was no
different to dancing indoors.
8
Numbers in brackets are used to identify individual respondents while maintaining anonymity.
A festival is about being more connected with our true selves, that is
with the outdoors, earth and nature. (3)
It deepens my connections with people and place. (19)
Running through the responses was a frequent reference to the interrelation

between the music, the people and the earth, and it was this triangulation
that seemed to produce the most effusive descriptions of the festival experience
as being ‘meditative’, ‘playful’ and ‘transformative’. For respondents,
the critical distinction between outdoor and indoor experience was the
sensation of freedom. This feeling was expressed as physical, emotional and
spiritual release, often in combination. The outdoor environment provided
literal space to move and metaphorical space in which to be different. The
natural environment was seen to provide the setting for enactments of
liberation that were in stark contrast to daily life.
It is a chance to play, to be free, to let go and to flow through troubles

and worries in a way that exposes the truth of matters and gives life a
focus and a course to follow that wasn’t clear without the space, time and
clarity of the dancefloor. (2)
Having beautiful nature or beautiful art made with love around you
creates a space and setting conducive to feeling safe, and free to let go and
rise up in your true nature. (2)
Dancing outdoors is bliss, in the sun, in the dark, even in the rain! You
can go bonkers as conkers and have the freedom to do so. (13)
The sense of freedom from not being confined produces a spiritual
freedom that is reinforced by the direct contact with the natural world,
especially for me as a city dweller. For me, it produces a sense of
communion. (19)
In many accounts it was the very act of dancing outdoors, occupying

outdoor space freely and expressively, that fostered a sensation of
togetherness:
Dancing outdoors can connect me with other people, it is nice to share a

beat, share a collective experience. (1)
Dancing outdoors makes me feel alive … Sharing the experience with
other people makes me feel more connected to them. (3)
I feel a strong sense of ‘secret community’. (4)
The notion of ‘secret community’ here is interesting insofar as it indicates

belonging to a group that is somehow protected, clandestine and exclusive.
Here, the shared moment excludes the outside world as much as it includes
those present. The ‘blissful festival family’ (Nozstock 2015) is a powerful
trope and reinforces notions of belonging and strengthened familial ties.
As well as facilitating connections between people, the festival space was
seen to allow connections with place:
[The feeling] is one of connection; connection to the music, to the people,

to the earth, to the sky and to myself. To feel united with something
greater than I could ever imagine, and yet to get the sense that in this
moment, life is so breathtakingly real. (8)
In a busy working life dancing outdoors reminds me of how small I am
(we are) and can help me keep things in perspective … It provides me with
a chance to reconnect to nature that’s different from going for a walk in
the hills. The music and nature work in perfect harmony. (18)
This feeling of interconnectedness, or reconnection with something that

has been lost, is expressed variously as connection with a more authentic
version of self; connection to nature and the universe; reconnection to
a simpler way of life; and as connection to one’s immediate and present
environment. The outdoor locale plays a significant role in facilitating this
process of reconnection. The experience is expressed in quasi-spiritual tones
with nature configured as being the conduit to authenticity.
Being in the outdoors space can subtly liven our senses and reminds us of
our origins. We are the elements; we are nature. By awakening our senses
we are creating the conditions whereby we can be open and present and
are able to meet and respond in a moment of genuine contact. In the
transitional outdoor space we hold the potential to let go of our culturally
given roles, associations and resistances and in doing so, we can liberate
our energy for full creative expression in relation to the music, to the art,
to another and to ourselves. (8)
The outdoor space of the alternative festival is conceived as a space of

liberation where ‘genuine’ contact might be made and where individuals
take some responsibility for producing those very conditions in which this
may occur. There is an implied sense of responsibility and accountability
woven into this statement that demonstrates a belief in the ability of outdoor
space to remind us of the present moment, the here and now. Consistent
with Massey’s idea that space is constituted through interactions and is the
product of interrelations (2005: 5), the outdoor space of the festival is felt,
at least, as one that encourages negotiation, encounter and transition.
The English countryside has for centuries provided the context for what
we might call the propagation of ‘the pastoral myth’. Life in the country has
long been regarded as more wholesome, authentic, natural and spiritually
edifying than city living. The idealized countryside acts as a counterpoint
to the inequalities and injustices of the city and harks back to a time of
communal landownership. As John Short points out, ‘this image has been
the basis of a whole series of rural utopian creeds from Shakers to hippies.
It is the communizing of the rural idyll’ (1991: 32). In many ways, the
environmental ideologies of the alternative festival scene fit neatly into
this paradigm. Immersion in a countryside that is of outstanding beauty
and remote, is seen as providing the route to the flow experience of festival
togetherness (Hetherington 2000: 64):
The experience should be more than ‘outdoors’, it should be situated in a

setting of outstanding natural beauty if possible. (1)
When I think ‘outdoors’ here I think of a remote site within natural
surroundings: be it rural countryside, deep woodlands or remote hills.
The further removed from our association with the mundane world, the
more potent the effect of the experience. (8)
The experience is seen as providing participants with a potential ‘effect’ that

they carry with them back into daily life as they become ‘reset, recharged,
renewed, refreshed, ready for the mundane again’ (2). Whether such an
effect actually occurs is, of course, subject to speculation. However, what
is apparent is the resurgence of the pastoral myth in a time of austerity and
widening social inequalities, coupled with a growing and fervent belief that
expressions of communality, played out in rural settings are, in some way,
good for participants. The aesthetic register and organizational design of
events is created to reinforce this pastoral playground, using iconography
taken from other contexts such as the village fete, the medieval fayre and
the free party/illegal rave in the woods. Alchemy, for example, uses straw
bales both as soundproofing devices but also as climbing frames. Straw is
scattered around simply for people to play in. Bunting, flags, fairy lights,
hand-made sculptures and art works are in abundance. A streamside walk
under weeping willows leads to healing tents, fire pits and a pedal-powered
stage. Taking place at the Autumn Equinox, collective celebration of nature is
a fundamental part of the event and the free party/Traveller ‘vibe’ evidenced
most effectively by the extensive galleries of photographs on the festival’s
website.9
The quest for intimate connection to the natural environment and a deep
sense of belonging in space in times of hardship and economic divide, mirror
retrospective accounts of rave. As Mark Harrison of Spiral Tribe puts it:
No matter how remote, how windswept, the show always went on.
Every weekend we searched out the few remaining wild places: forests,
mountains, moorland … We dodged roadblocks and patrols by navigating
9
Photographs of Alchemy Festival can be accessed from http://www.alchemyfestival.co.uk/
photos.html.
back roads, woodland tracks and ancient green lanes. With the ground
underfoot as our path and the lie of the land as our guide, we drifted
over the edge of the only map we had. Our inner-selves reached out
and made new connections with geographical space and geographical
space reached in and made new connections with us. We were exploring
another England. A synaptic landscape (Harrison 2013).
Harrison’s newly aligned relationship with the landscape might be what

Gieseking and Mangold call a type of ‘spatial imagination’ through which
we are able to ‘enact alternative ways of living’ (2014: 357). As they argue,
by re-making spaces and thereby altering our interactions with others within
those spaces, new ways of understanding and representing our place in the
world are required. By establishing the presence of a spatial or geographical
imagination in which the individual as agent is at liberty to conjure, enact
and realize alternatives, we can begin to see how society’s relationship with
the landscape becomes politically and psychically charged. A reprioritization
of the imagination allows the dimensions of the alternative festival to be
read as a space of playful potential and social empathy. If festivals provide
opportunities for the enactment of imagination, they become potential sites
of learning. By dwelling in the imaginative realm for even a short period of
time, ways of living differently come into view, empathy can be built and
tools gathered to break what is supposedly fixed and finished.
Conclusion
For Gieseking and Mangold, ‘spatial imagination can open up ways
to take notice of being in the world’ (2014: 357). The path between the
imaginative realm and the concrete world in which we operate is efficacious
allowing individuals the freedom to dream how the other might become.
The imaginative geographies of festival culture are rooted in historical
narratives of political freedoms, opposition and resistance as well as personal
narratives of abandon, hedonism and collective play. Imagining alternative
places and societies has a long history and the concept of utopia/dystopia
in relation to rave culture has been discussed by various commentators
seeking to understand and critique the space-making practices of pioneer
ravers (Reynolds 1998; Gibson 1999). Of course, these events as cultural
products are not without their contradictions. While on the one hand they
sit within the tradition of earlier countercultural scenes such as raves, free
parties and occupations, from another perspective they are the output of
a process of domestication of this same legacy. As ticketed events, it could
be argued that what is on offer is a packaged, sanitized, hyperreal version
of what was originally conceived as a tangible alternative to mainstream
ideologies and capitalist structures. However, if we return to the idea
that the TAZ may be understood as an attitudinal stance, a radical tactic

emerging within the very structures it seeks to oppose, then it is possible to
see that, located in open countryside and with an articulated commitment
to participation, certain festivals are creating the conditions by which the
peak experience of autonomy may be reached. Responses from festivalgoers
suggest that their outdoor dance experiences contribute not only to their
immediate enjoyment of the event but also to their personal sense of well-
being, expressed predominantly as interconnectivity and liberation.
If it is possible to accept that alternative festivals that belong to the rave/
traveller tradition are providing participants with collective experiences that
have the potential to be transformative, then what are the critical factors
that contribute to that process? Undoubtedly, the outdoor character of these
events means that participation and forms of agency are socialized in more
visible and direct ways. Interactions are face-to-face, person-to-person and
place-to-person. The removed geophysical character of such events helps
individuals and groups congregate, organize and form social bonds in
ways that are different to, say, urban events or those that occur indoors.
The British countryside is an idealized, romanticized and politicized space.
As such, it is the ideal environment for a culture that also oscillates between
these positions, often quite intentionally and strategically. The pastoral myth
continues to circulate. If nothing else, festival utopias reflect the desire for
a more co-located, present way of life that is unmediated. The rural festival
offers an escape from the routines of city life and provides participants
with a temporary framework for living in a way that makes them feel
more connected to both their fellow human beings and the places in which
they encounter each other. The wider implication of this is to ask what is
occurring in our cities, our homes, our indoor spaces and our virtual worlds
that prompts so many people to enact a weekend exodus? What ‘alternative’
are these events offering and how might the model of ‘three days well-lived’
be translated to other contexts where participation, connectivity, critique
and agency would be useful, if not urgent, processes to harness?
Acknowledgements
My thanks to everyone who responded to the questionnaire and also to Jeff
Gordon of Alchemy Festival for kindly agreeing to be interviewed.
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CHAPTER SEVEN
Free Parties and Teknivals:

Gift-Exchange and Participation
on the Margins of the Market
and the State
Anne Petiau
(Translation by Luis-Manuel Garcia)
Translator’s introduction: Anne Petiau’s essay provides an analysis of the

many dimensions of participation [to participate, but also to contribute
materially] in France’s ‘free parties’ and ‘teknivals’. Working both historically
and ethnographically, she develops this analysis using the theoretical
framework of reciprocal gift-exchange, first conceptualized in The Gift [Le
Don] by Marcel Mauss (1997 [1950]) but also further developed by noted
French anthropologists Alain Caillé (2000) and Jacques T. Godbout (2000).
Petiau notes that free parties are understood by organizers and attendees
to be ‘free’ in both senses of the term – freedom [liberté] as well as ‘for
free’ [gratuité] – while nonetheless relying on various forms of financial
and in-kind donations from attendees. Notably, the free party itself is
characterized by organizers as a gift offered freely to participants. And
yet, as studies of gift-exchange suggest, gifts come with ‘strings attached’,
Original publication: Anne Petiau. 2012. ‘Free-parties et teknivals. Dans les marges du marché
et de l’Etat, système de don et participation’. In Festivals, raves parties, free parties. Histoire des
rencontres musicales en France et à l’étranger, N. Bénard (ed.), 587–610. Paris: Camion Blanc.
with obligations and expectations of reciprocity. And so, Petiau argues that
participants’ donations may not be as optional and freely given as they
seem, illustrating how the actors involved in free parties articulate these
expectations while reconciling them with the open-access ethos of these
events. In addition to this insightful analysis, the essay provides a useful
introduction both to the French free party/teknival scene as well as to the
anthropology of gift-exchange.
At first through raves and then ‘free parties’ and ‘teknivals’, electronic
music has developed at the margins of the professionalized and
institutionalized networks of music and live spectacle.1 This preference
for alternative (read: clandestine) practices is one way that fans can avoid
the administrative, legislative and financial constraints that hinder the
development of activities and the organization of festive events. Also at stake
in keeping oneself on the margins of institutionalized networks is the ability
to develop logics foreign to both the market and the state. Free parties – and
to a lesser degree raves – operate under a logic of gift-exchange, playing on
its symbolic dimensions. This approach offers a perspective on the diverse
practices in these festive spaces, ranging from the principle of donation that
prevails over access to parties up to and including the ordinary sociability
of participants.
Alternative electronic festivities: From raves

to free parties
In England, raves emerged as a result of new regulations passed by the
Thatcher regime in 1988, forcing London clubs to close at two o’clock in
the morning. Wild parties were organized in the countryside or in suburban
warehouses; these warehouse parties and later acid parties grew explosively
to the sound of house music (Garnier and Brun-Lambert 2003: 28–29, 55).
In France, despite the different legal context, the principle of organizing
parties outside of venues intended for such purposes began to gain currency.
Even if promoters, concert halls and nightclubs did not hesitate to convert
themselves to these new sounds, the emancipation from sites dedicated to
1
This chapter picks up on several conclusions from my thesis in sociology, ‘Musiques et
musiciens électroniques. Contribution à une sociologie des musiques populaires [Music and
electronic musicians. Contribution to a sociology of popular music]’ (defended in 2006 at
the University of Paris 5 under the supervision of Michel Maffesoli), for which a survey was
conducted in conjunction with direct observation and comprehensive interviews with thirty-
seven musicians and fans. Quotations from interviews included here have also been drawn
from this thesis.
FREE PARTIES AND TEKNIVALS 161
music events gave rise to a new festive format: the ‘rave’ party. This created
an opening for fans and amateur event-promoters, who could thereafter
organize parties outside of conventional venues and without observing
applicable laws, thus simplifying matters to a great extent. Thus, along with
larger events organized by professionals came a proliferation of more or less
large-scale raves, often clandestine and semi-legal,2 organized by amateurs
in varying degrees of formal association. One accelerating factor in the
development of raves was in fact its growing repression. In the middle of
the 1990s, it became very difficult for individuals and amateurs to organize
a rave party in France. Requests for permits were almost always refused
when electronic music was involved. Police interventions become more
frequent, based on the recommendations of a 1995 interministerial circular.3
The intensifying repression of raves together with the near-systematic
refusal of permits served to make completely clandestine operations the
more attractive choice, thus contributing to the growing development of
‘free parties’, also inspired by developments in England. At the end of the
1980s, the world of UK ‘new age travellers’ (Delorme 2001: 107–23) came
into contact with the acid party scene, which was experiencing explosive
growth at the time. Some of these travellers converted to these new sounds;
equipped with sound systems, they punctuated their movements with the
organization of parties. The repression of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher
and her government pushed some of them to emigrate to France – notably
Spiral Tribe,4 under the threat of a conviction against them in England.
Thus was the ‘free party model’ imported into France at the beginning
of the 1990s where, following the example of the English tribes, sound
systems such as les Teknocrates, les Nomades, les Psychiatrik and d’OQP
were establishing themselves. ‘Teknivals’, gigantic techno-festivals open to
any sound system that wanted to play their music, also made an appearance
(Grynszpan 1999: 25–26, 38). With the second interministerial circular
2
That is, respecting certain conditions necessary for the organization of a live event. The
organization of a live event requires the possession of an event-promoter’s license. Individuals
or associations can nonetheless organize up to six live events per year without a license (at
the time of original publication, 2012), but only in accordance with applicable regulations,
including: requesting a permit from city hall, declaring the event at the local police station,
obtaining a temporary license to serve alcohol, requesting permission from SACEM (France’s
rights-management society for music) for the public playback of musical works registered in
their catalogues as well as paying the corresponding licensing fees.
3
Entitled, ‘Raves, high-risk events’, this memo lists infractions that agents of law enforcement
can mobilize in order to interrupt a party and pursue its organizers. It advocates refusing
permit requests in cases that involve a rave party. For more on the history of French raves, see
Fontaine and Fontana (1996) and Racine (2002).
4
[Tr.: See also, St John, Graham. 2009. Technomad: Global Raving Countercultures. London:
Equinox Publishing Ltd.]
of 1998, the repression of free parties hardened,5 finally crystalizing in

2002, when a public-safety law came into effect, targeting ‘certain festive
gatherings with a musical character’. This mandated that the organization
of a free party be declared in advance, which could then be prohibited if
the venue does not fulfil legal requirements, while also sanctioning the
seizure of sound equipment, the levying of fines, and legal action in the
case of a failure to declare or the violation of an injunction. This new legal
context together with numerous seizures of sound equipment halted the
development of free parties. They did not disappear entirely, in any case,
but they have become more discreet. Negotiations between organizers and
local authorities allowed for teknivals to take place legally.6 Some of these
– such as one in Chambley in May of 2004 – attracted a crowd of up
to 80,000. Between 2003 and 2013, both legal and illegal teknivals were
organized, with some clandestine events followed by seizures of sound
equipment, such as occurred at the teknival at Bouafles in 2009 and at
Saint-Martin de Crau in 2011 (Kosmicki 2010: 654–70).
The transition from raves to free parties can be seen on several fronts
as the radicalization of the principles adopted by raves. On the one hand,
there was a radicalization in terms of their relation to the law, since they
ignored the legal contingencies of organizing live events. Free parties,
which managed themselves financially as well as technically and artistically,
eliminated the remuneration of employees and the need for professionals.
They also eliminated admission fees, in favour of a principle of voluntary
donation. Participants were thus not required to provide a fixed entrance
fee, but rather were invited to make a contribution – financial or material –
to the organizing collective. On the other hand, free parties radicalized the
organizational form of collectives. These involved an affective investment
and a larger staff, since their members often collectively owned the sound
equipment that enabled amplified music playback – sometimes along with
the bus or truck necessary for its transportation – at times even living
together as a commune (Petiau 2006, Pourtau 2009). And finally, free parties
radicalized musical and artistic expression.
Raves opened up a marginal position for a time, where actors developed
events in parallel to professionalized musical and festive milieus – at least
5
This distinguished between gatherings having obtained a permit and clandestine gatherings.
It advocated accompanying the former and treating them along the lines of similar types of
gatherings about permit requests (the example given is that of rock concerts), provided that
they fulfil all of the conditions stipulated by law; but it reiterated existing repressive orders
towards the latter.
6
The first legal teknivals were nicknamed ‘Sarkovals’, referencing the name of the Minister of
the Interior at the time, Nicolas Sarkozy. These were followed by other authorized teknivals
arising from negotiations with public authorities, followed in turn by a new event-concept
called ‘Multisons’, authorized at the district/regional level [départements].
until some of these protagonists became professionals in turn. The return

to clandestine and amateur operations achieved by free parties reopened
this marginal position. Once again, actors bypassed judiciary structures,
avoiding administrative, legislative and financial obstacles. Once again,
they invented ways of being together, spaces of congregation and
mechanisms of sonic transmission. In this sense, one could see the historical
transition from raves to free parties as a reopening of participative space
(Petiau 2004). Respecting the legislative framework for live entertainment
entails expenses (e.g. venue rental, security, licensing fees to the performing
rights organization SACEM, etc.), and the establishment of a parallel
network for music and parties provides a means of engaging in musical
and organizational activities while avoiding the constraints that would
otherwise limit access to these activities. At the same time, since they avoided
professional networks, since they avoided recourse to state institutions and
freed themselves of their regulations and, in short, since they developed on
the margins of the market and the state, these young actors were able to
develop practices in relation to different logics. In these alternative festive
practices, one can recognize the means by which individuals constantly re-
establish social ties relevant to a system of gift-exchange, whether outside
the systems of market and state or in their interstices (Godbout 2000
[1992]: 235, 237).
The donation principle

For participants, a ‘free party’ is free in every sense of the term. Exploiting
the double meaning of ‘free’ in English, they refer both to the freedom of
action within these events as well as their free-of-charge admission [gratuité].
In reality, however, free parties are based on a donation principle, and a
donation is not ‘for free’, per se. As Mauss has demonstrated (1997: 143–
279), the gift is a system composed of giving, receiving and reciprocation,
entailing elements of obligation and interest. At a free party, in fact, donation
takes on an obligatory character; obligation exists in the sense that failing to
make a donation is frowned upon, while the donation itself – even a specific
level of donation – may be demanded.
Bertrand: Certainly, if someone arrives to the entrance in a BMW, an

Audi, or even a nicely polished [Peugeot] 405, five guys sitting inside
wearing fifteen hundred francs worth of clothing, and they want to give
a donation of only five francs each, you tell them, ‘Guys, please, make
an effort; we’re busting our ass for you, so do something now or help
us out’. So, it sometimes happens that we’re a bit blunt with people like
that, with the obvious slackers, but we appreciate the work of all of those
people who show goodwill and come to lend a hand.
Free parties are nonetheless defined by their free admission, as much by the
collectives that value offering the party-as-gift as by the participants who value
contributing to a free-of-charge party. Here one can recognize the ‘rule of the
implicit’ that is characteristic of systems of reciprocal gift-exchange, where
there is no ignorance, but rather an active and conscious refusal by both

parties to be explicit, a double and symmetrical hypocrisy, thus normally
absurd and pointless. And furthermore: not only does one refuse to make
the rules explicit, one seems to wish to articulate other ones that affirm
the opposite of what happens ‘in reality’. One affirms the absence of an
expectation of reciprocity, all the while expecting the gift to be returned.
One proclaims gift-giving while being engaged in reciprocity (Godbout
2000 [1992]: 262– 63).
The printing of the abbreviation ‘PAF’ [participer aux frais, or contribute

to expenses] on rave flyers was characteristic of this tension in relation to
the gift, in the sense that it was an invitation to contribute [participer] to
defraying the costs of the party rather than paying a fee in order to attend.
At free parties, partygoers are invited to ‘participate’ in the defraying of
expenses, but the rule remains implicit.
A donation in the form of a financial contribution is only one mode of
counter-gift among many: participants can also donate cigarettes, hash, gas,
etc. Besides, the party-as-gift calls for participation in a more general sense:
helping to set up or clean the event location, enlivening the festive space
through spectacular street theatre, and also simply by dancing. After all, what
is the use in ‘giving’ a party if the participants do not fulfil it through dance?
Olivier: It’s that there’s really lots of energy for making things and offering
things to people. Maybe offering things to people is a way of nourishing
one’s own ego, but still, there are people who dance, people who juggle, for
our viewing pleasure … I mean to say that, regardless of what you do, it’s
also for the crowd; you also offer it to the crowd. I mean to say that even
just one person dancing to the music, you’ll always have someone who
will dig it, who’ll say, ‘Oh yeah, his dancing cracks me up’, or something.
So, there’s this kind of exchange between the people who dance, also the
people who sell – because there’s a lot of business, as much for water as
for drugs and beer, sandwiches and all that – but everyone offers their
little thing that makes things work. And, without one or the other, it won’t
work. To begin with, the sound systems [collectives] give their sound to the
crowd for free, without anyone having to do anything; you’re not buying
a ticket so that you can watch. Ultimately, that’s really the free-party spirit,
that’s what’s beautiful about it and that’s what we all love about it. It’s the
fact that there are people who give this, and considering that it’s the people
who organize (so to speak) who are giving this, well then the people who
received it are also obliged to give a minimum amount.
The rule of gift-exchange, if it functions implicitly in actu, is clearly

formulated here. Faced with the party-as-gift offered by these collectives,
participants are also prompted to contribute to the maintenance of the
festive event. The party’s financial, artistic and technical self-management
implies that all help is welcome, and that it can take multiple forms.
Jeremy: You have some guys with vans, and what do they do? Well, they’ll
park their vans all around, making a dancefloor. I mean, if there weren’t
any vans, there wouldn’t be a dancefloor, so there you go. I mean, with
the means that we have, we couldn’t do otherwise, in any case. They’re
even helping us out, really.7 And as for what we bring, well I’ll tell you
that we’re just an ‘engine’, but still, when you stick an engine in a car with
no wheels, no steering wheel, no whatever, you’re not going anywhere.
So, that’s what I like about it.
Free parties are experienced as a collective production, in the sense

that the sound systems expect an investment, an active contribution [Fr.
participation] from the audience, and also in the sense that the participants,
faced with the collective’s party-as-gift, are drawn into the obligation to
contribute to the collective event in their own fashion. Both groups derive
pleasure from their engagement in this system of gift-exchange: for the
former, pleasure in giving the party-as-gift, while for the latter, pleasure in
making a contribution to it.
This participatory dimension and the importance of mutual aid are both
emphasized by certain ravers as well, which is notably the case in parties
devoted to the ‘psytrance’ genre of electronic music. These sometimes offer
free admission when they are held in developing and emerging nations
(India, Thailand, South Africa, etc.), and the participants can contribute to
the party not only by dancing but also by performing amusements of various
sorts (juggling, fire-dancing, decoration, etc.) and providing support in
organizational tasks.8 At the largest of festivals, which charge an admission
fee but take place outdoors (Europe during the summer season, the southern
hemisphere during the European winter), participants also find a liberty of
7
Free parties take place in locations not normally dedicated to musical gatherings, and so the
festive space is not delimited in the same manner as in a concert hall or a discothèque. Vans and
trucks parked by participants can thus contribute to the delimitation of the dancefloor.
8
Psytrance parties are generally not self-managed, however. In some cases, they are managed
by local actors (for example, in Goa or on the southern islands of Thailand) who have found
in Western festive tourism the basis for a flourishing economy. The parties may offer free
admission, but the organizers can, for example, reap substantial profits from the bar, where
prices are up to ten times more expensive than local standards. Other parties and festivals are
organized by promoters (in South Africa, Portugal, France, etc.), charging admission fees that
can sometimes be quite high.
movement and a participatory dimension that they deem to be absent from

more traditional party venues such as clubs.
Jocelyn: For me, an ideal trance party would be one where people will
look after and help each other; that’s a part of the pleasure. Yesterday
afternoon, I was bored at the party because it was the afternoon and
there’s nobody around at that time, so I instinctively started helping
the organizers, who were having trouble, and I got great deal out of
it, personally. I completely understand why Mother Theresa dedicated
her life to helping others. That’s present at an ideal party, this desire to
help one another … There are lots of people who offer to help with the
decoration, and such.
Participants and collectives thus highlight the importance of mutual aid

within the festive space. In a particular way, this involves ‘giving back’,
contributing in one’s own way to the party’s fulfilment, even if one is giving
back to others.
Jeremy: There’s also the problem of trash. If you manage to raise

awareness about it, and if in the morning you get there and you see
big heaps of garbage bags neatly arranged, well then, you’re happy.
What’s more, you see, that means people really wanted to contribute
[Fr. participer], and that’s also what lends a bit of magic to the free
party, since everyone lends a hand; it’ll be the bottle of water you give
to some guy, a bandage you give to someone else. Everyone helps each
other out that way, it’s autonomous. And there you go, that’s a good
free party to me.
Ultimately, the ‘ideal’ free party as it is represented by actors – an ideal rarely

reached, to be sure, and just as mythical and real as collective effervescence9 –
would achieve the ‘total reciprocity’ described by Mauss, where the
entanglement of (direct, indirect, alternating, or delayed) reciprocities would
engender mutual engagement while also bringing the group itself into being
(cited in Papilloud 2002: 96).
Not all participants are sensitized to this participatory dimension, which
operates in the symbolic register. Various modes of engagement exist within
the party, whether it be rave or free party. Participatory experience and the
experience of festive effervescence are two distinct modalities, two aspects
of the party’s lived experience. Some participants come simply in search of
9
Some studies refer to Emile Durkheim’s concept of « effervescence » (1979 [1912]) to
characterize the excessive excitation of electronic dance music parties (Hampartzoumian 2004,
Petiau 2004).
collective musical experience, the loss of self on the dancefloor, as well as a

moment of conviviality. Free parties thus gain much of their attractiveness
from the breadth of the festive rupture that they generate. Some seek both of
these dimensions, each reinforcing the other. If it is ultimately the members
of the organizing sound systems who address this theme most directly, it
is undoubtedly because they have been sensitized to this dimension, the
participatory experience of partying having led to giving one’s own party-as-
gift in turn. Indeed, Lionel Pourtau (2009: 61–62) emphasizes that putting
together a sound system and throwing a party are ways of paying back the
debt of initiation in a transitive manner; we return to others the fact of
having been initiated ourselves. This manifests as a contemporary mode of
gift-exchange, in that it is turned towards strangers.
System of gift-exchange or parallel economy?

Commercial exchanges take place at the heart of the free party: the sale of
records, cassettes, clothing, drinks, food and drugs. Donations, drink stalls
and stands all represent a source of revenue for organizing sound systems.
These exchanges constitute a parallel economy, since they escape taxation
by the state (Grynszpan 1999: 28–30). For some authors, the affirmation
and demand of free admission to free parties merely functions to mask the
real interests of the actors and to obfuscate the circulation of money (Liogier
2004: 143–44):
De facto, the practice of donation provides a glimpse of how the party is

a zone ruled by both commercial and non-commercial exchanges. In fact,
this generous contribution by each and every one appears in reality to be
a tithe. The participant is not free to give whatever he likes, despite the
organizers claims to the contrary. In this way, the latter make use of a
symbolic act of giving (the gift of oneself, participation) in order to force
the individual to obey an obligatory practice of the commercial order.
Not offering any money – or offering too little – exposes one to forceful
expulsion from the party (sometimes including physical brutality).
The average donation amounts to around 20 francs. If one cannot
contribute money, the individual is called upon to donate cigarettes, a
piece of hashish or something else. The exchange thus becomes non-
commercial and the financial profit is replaced by payment in-kind. Here,
the gift hides lucrative activities (Queudrus 2000: 27).
It seems difficult to concede that organizing collectives would have

financial gain as their primary goal in throwing a party. If this were the
case, one might justifiably ask, on the one hand, why they organize parties
instead of simply engaging in clandestine activities, and on the other
hand, why they resort to the language of gift-exchange and free-of-charge

participation. It would also seem much simpler, if indeed they had nothing
more than lucrative activity in mind, to substitute the donation principle
with a fixed admission fee. It should be noted that Queudrus enumerates
in fact all of the characteristics of the gift: its characterization as free in
theory but obligatory in reality (to paraphrase Marcel Mauss); monetary
non-equivalence; the ‘rule of the implicit and unsaid’, where one proclaims
rules that diverge from what actually happens; and the entanglement
among participants of disinterest and interest. As Godbout notes, ‘If
modernity refuses to believe in the existence of the gift, it is because it
represents the gift as the inverse of egoistic material interest. In their eyes, a
“real” gift could only be free of costs [gratuit]. And since freedom from cost
[gratuité] is impossible […], the gift, the real gift, is just as impossible’ (2000
[1992]: 14). This approach evacuates the specificity of the donation and the
importance of the notions of gift and freedom from charge [gratuité] for
actors, as well as the significance that these actors ascribe to their practices.
And yet, the pursuit of material interest or prestige is not incompatible with
gift-exchange. In fact, it is precisely in the gift itself that the pursuit of such
interests, generosity, spontaneity and the pleasure of giving mix together
(Caillé 2000: 126).
One could risk making a comparison and say that, somewhat like the
kula,10 these commercial exchanges take place at the margins of the gift-
exchange. Mauss attests that commercial exchanges are indeed carried out in
parallel to the ceremonial exchanges of the Trobriand Islands. The maritime
voyages organized in connection with the kula can also be an opportunity to
carry out commercial exchanges, but these are carefully distinguished from
the ceremonial exchanges, which are the only ones considered ‘noble’ (Mauss
1997: 176). In a way, these commercial exchanges are also contained within
the margins of the free party, since they do not affect the donation principle
that governs access to parties. In other words, the presence of commercial
exchange does not affect the symbolic dimension of the gift. The free party
is experienced as a party-as-gift by both collectives and participants, even
if commercial exchanges take place within. And, like in the case of the
kula, it is those exchanges operating under a logic of gift-exchange that are
considered the most noble.
For a few, free parties are undoubtedly an ideal context for conducting
remunerative practices that are illegal or part of a parallel economy. It seems
nonetheless simplistic to reduce the entirety of the free party down to a space
conducive to the development of remunerative activities, thus rendering
10
The kula is a system of tribal and intertribal gift-exchange of symbolic goods, practiced by
the inhabitants of the Trobriand Islands and New Guinea. This was studied by B. Malinowski
in Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922), to which Mauss refers (1997).
abstract the passionate dimension claimed by participants while also

ignoring the specificity of the donation principle along with its concomitant
participatory dimension.
Where giving becomes virtue

At the heart of the free party, the capacity to give comes to be established
as a virtue. In part, this governs ordinary sociability: both sharing one’s
food, drinks, drugs and offering one’s (mechanical, technical, etc.) expertise
constitute a well-appreciated behaviour in this festive space. For collectives
and musicians, this also has to do with knowing how to ‘give’ a party and
music. If the party-as-gift prompts one and all to participate in the collective
event, it also prompts other collectives to make a gift of their parties in
turn. There is a certain degree of emulation between sound systems.
The principles of honour and competition identified by Mauss in the
potlatch11 find expression to a certain degree in the free party. The goal here
is not to establish the equivalence of two social phenomena so culturally
estranged as potlatches and free parties. We should recall that, for Mauss,
the potlatch represented an exemplary expression of the system of gift-
exchange, in that certain elements are ‘exaggerated’ (to use his phrasing)
and thus more intelligible (Mauss 1997: 209–12). In fact, the party-as-
gift given by a collective functions like a provocation, in the sense that it
challenges other collectives to offer their own party-as-gift in turn as well
as to do it better and to give more, whenever possible. This challenge incites
some collectives to greater and greater logistical feats in the organization
of their parties, within the limits of their resources: enormous walls of
sound, certainly, but also light shows, lasers and decorations. This orgy of
expenditure elicits admiration, but also at times critique (‘throwing away
cash to have a techno Disneyland’, as one participant puts it in a discussion
forum on the internet),12 seeing in it a spectacularization far afield from
initial ideals.
Collectives garner prestige and renown within this social world according
to their capacity to provide both parties and music as gifts (see also Pourtau
2009: 158). One should also note that some among them see a deviation from
their ideals in the accumulation of renown and prestige through the party-as-
11
Potlatch is a gift-exchange system practiced in numerous ancient societies, notably indigenous
tribes of the American Northwest. Potlatch has a festive dimension, but also religious, economic
and political ones. It is notable for its agonistic character: in the course of ceremonies, goods
may be not only given but destroyed.
12
See, http://3boom.net.
gift. In their eyes, the only motivation for organizing a party-as-gift should
be ‘to advance the movement’, that is, to give without any interest other than
contributing to the festive phenomenon of free parties. Furthermore, the
prestige attached to tribes and sound systems appear to them to contradict
the principles of free access and anonymity that they endorse.
Olivier: I think that techno did not originally mean, ‘Ooh, Spiral Tribe!
Ah les Teknokrates! Oh, les THC…’13 In the beginning we fought against
that, I think. But unfortunately people need to go, ‘Oh, the DJ!’ ‘Ah,
they’re better than them’, presumably because they prefer the sound of
one or the other. As a result, you’re less connected to the festive side and
the message that it delivers. There is always this contradictory element
in all things; we want lots of things but at the same time we are no less
attached to our social values, our culture, our upbringing, and capitalism
itself, which tells you, ‘You must be better than others’. It’s a milieu that
is really so contradictory that it’s difficult to achieve anything, in the end.
If the gift is to be held up as a virtue, it must be completely disinterested for

its actors. And yet, as we have already seen, the gift is always torn between
two poles, pulled along two axes: on the one hand, that of disinterest and
interest and, on the other, that of freedom and constraint (Caillé 2000).
Incontestably – and despite the fact that certain actors would like it to be
otherwise, in order to preserve the ideal of purity that enfolds the notions
of gift and free access in our society, which seem to be completely opposed
to notions of interest and profit – the party-as-gift and the gift of music
also generate social superiority and contribute to the development of
social hierarchy. But if presenting oneself as generous incontestably ‘reaps
rewards’ in these terms, the criticisms generated when certain collectives
gain fame and renown – which is deplored as a reproduction of the ‘star
system’ that they oppose, where the collective comes to play the role of the
star – demonstrate that the gift cannot be reduced to the logics of interest
and profit. In other words, there is also a certain pleasure to be found in
giving the party-as-gift, a generosity that makes sense in itself.
Self-organisation, gift-exchange
and participation
What both raves and free parties show us is that the self-organizing capacities
of social groups – that is, their capacity to invent forms of collectivity, spaces
of congregation and mechanisms of musical transmission – at the margins
of institutions. Some authors have highlighted the pertinence of TAZ
Sound systems that have organized free parties.

13
to understanding free parties (e.g. Grynszpan 1999: 30–31). Developed

by Hakim Bey, this concept shares a certain genealogy with Maffesoli’s
‘interstitial liberties’ (1992: 85–98) and De Certeau’s ‘arts of doing’ (1990).
What these authors have in common is the attention they give to the way
in which popular categories and ordinary people react to the constraints
of order instituted by practices of resistance, subversion, reappropriation
and disappearance. Their focus of attention is displaced away from the
institution and its modalities of imposing order towards the analysis of those
procedures through which consumers and users either subvert products and
spaces, turning passive consumption into active production, or invent for
themselves spaces of autonomy and liberty within the interstices of the status
quo (Dosse 2002). Individuals mobilize practices resistant to the logics of
market and state, thus also avoiding being reduced to the roles of consumer
of goods or user of services. At stake in this avoidance is the constitution of
the subject itself (De Certeau 1990: 52–53).
The development of raves and free parties in the gaps of institutions,
the resistance on the part of free party participants to professionalization
as well as the legislative framework dictated by the state all serve as means
for participants to preserve their complete investment in organization and
musical practices. To clarify, it is not the intention here to mount a critique of
the market and the state but rather to grasp the stakes for actors involved in
gathering together, undertaking and developing activities in an autonomous
manner. This also enables these actors to deploy alternate logics. The party-
as-gift, the gift of music, makes demands: it calls on each one to contribute
and commit oneself to the collective event. The gift of oneself (of time,
music, art) calls for reciprocity and, in festive contexts, takes the form of a
contribution [Fr. participation]. Here we encounter the notion of the wager,
consubstantial with the gift. The gift relies on the uncertainty of reciprocity;
even though organizers reduce this by instituting a donation principle, the
success of a party nonetheless depends on the goodwill of its participants –
for example, for site cleanup and waste management. This participatory
dimension constitutes one of the specificities of the festive experience of
raves and free parties.
Raves and above all free parties operate to a certain degree under a logic
of gift-exchange, playing on its symbolic dimensions. For Godbout, the gift
represents a link: its efficacy lies in its capacity to engender relationality,
to create social ties and to make relations last (Godbout 2000: 244–47).
To this definition we can now add that the gift also represents a form of
participation.
Organization based on a system of gift-exchange has its limits. It should
be noted that the wager made by organizers does not always pay off,
especially when the parties elicit growing attendance. The growing
enthusiasm for raves and free parties calls for the professionalization of
organizers or state involvement in management. For example, the state’s
involvement in the organization of teknivals – which drew tens of thousands
of attendees – has proven to be indispensible. Collective formation based

on a system of gift-exchange also runs up against its limits in the multiple
modalities of festive participation. Many attendees come simply to seek out
trance, effervescence and conviviality, rather than participatory experience,
which cannot bear any rupture between promoters and their audience.
References
Caillé, Alain. 2000. Anthropologie du don: Le tiers paradigme. Paris: Desclée de
Brouwer.
De Certeau, Michel. 1990. L’invention du quotidien. Vol. 1: Arts de Faire. Paris:
Gallimard.
Delorme, Annick. 2001. ‘Les new Age travellers: Une tentative d’individualisation
dans la société du risque’. Sociétés, 72: 107–23.
Dosse, François. 2002. ‘L’art du détournement: Michel de Certeau entre stratégies
et tactiques’. Esprit, 283: 206–24.
Durkheim, Emile. 1979 [1912]. Les formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse. Le
système totémique en Australie. Paris : Presses Universitaires de France.
Fontaine, Astrid and Caroline Fontana. 1996. Raver. Paris: Economica.
Garnier, Laurent and David Brun-Lambert. 2003. Electrochoc. Paris: Flammarion.
Godbout, Jacques T. 2000. Le don, la dette et l’identité: Homo donator vs homo
œconomicus. Paris: La Découverte.
Godbout, Jacques T. (with Alain Caillé). 2000. L’esprit du don. Paris: La
Découverte.
Grynszpan, Emmanuel. 1999. Bruyante techno: Réflexion sur le son de la free
party. Nantes: Mélanie Séteun.
Hampartzoumian, Stéphane. 2004. Effervescence techno. Paris : L’Harmattan.
Kosmicki, Guillaume. 2010. Free party. Une histoire, des histoires. Paris: Les mots
et le reste.
Liogier, Raphaël. 2004. ‘Entre marginalité magnifiée et récupération
“postindustrielle”’. Autrement, 231: 141–58.
Maffesoli, Michel. 1992. La transfiguration du politique. Paris: Grasset et
Fasquelle.
Mauss, Marcel. 1997 [1950]. Sociologie et anthropologie. Paris: PUF.
Papilloud, Christian. 2002. Le don de relation: Georg Simmel – Marcel Mauss.
Paris: L’Harmattan.
Petiau, Anne. 2004. ‘L’expérience techno, des raves aux free parties’. In special
issue, ‘La fête techno. Tout seul et tous ensemble’, ed. Béatrice Mabilon-Bonfils.
Autrement, 231: 28–42.
Petiau, Anne. 2006. ‘Marginalité et musiques électroniques’. Agora Débats/
Jeunesses, 42: 128–39.
Pourtau, Lionel. 2009. Techno: Voyage au cœur des nouvelles communautés
festives. Paris: CNRS Editions.
Queudrus, Sandy. 2000. Un maquis techno: Modes d’engagement et pratiques
sociales dans la free-party. Nantes: Mélanie Séteun.
Racine, Etienne. 2002. Le phénomeène techno: Clubs, raves, free-parties. Paris: Imago.
PART THREE
Cosmopolitan
Experiments and
Electroniculture
CHAPTER EIGHT
Towards a Cosmopolitan
Weekend Dance Culture in Spain:
From the Ruta Destroy to the
Sónar Festival
Paolo Magaudda
During its relatively short history, the role of electronic dance music culture
has consistently evolved, in terms of how it has been performed, perceived
and represented. This culture began as a phenomenon rooted mostly in
alternative, underground and suburban environments, and it was only after
the 2000s that this music became a cultural object increasingly legitimated
and integrated into global cultural, economic and institutional processes.
Today, it is usual to recognize electronic dance music as a key ingredient
of international events, a resource for urban promotional strategies as well
as a tool for tourism mobility. Part of this shift in the social role of dance
music can be seen, for example, in the change in spaces where it is usually
performed today. While electronic dance music was initially consumed
mainly in warehouses and clubs, where it all began during the 1980s (in
Chicago, Detroit, London and Manchester), in the last twenty years, it has
gradually moved to high-brow spaces such as galleries, art biennales and
international festivals.
Despite this transformation, dance cultures and practices have not lost their
connections with underground and alternative local music scenes. However,
it is clear that electronic dance music has been also integrated within more
legitimate and socially accepted models of cultural consumption and has
consequently become a valuable element of tourism flows, cosmopolitan
cultural economy and even institutional strategies of city branding. During

this expansion of consumer patterns, a specific type of electronic dance music
event has emerged as a crucial expression of this change: the international
music festival, a form of musical organisation no longer based exclusively
on a local music scene, but able to attract, for short periods, an increasingly
globalized, cosmopolitan and diverse audience.
The goal of this chapter is to offer a perspective on this reconfiguration
of the weekend dance culture by presenting two specific and contrasting
events and scenes that have emerged in Spain since the 1980s: the ‘ruta
destroy’ and the Sónar festival. The overall aims of the chapter are to offer
empirical descriptions of two distinctive weekend dance cultures and to
examine, through their trajectories and major differences, the evolution of
this wider process of reconfiguration of the identity, practices and economies
of electronic dance music. The differences between these advents in Spanish
dance music history are discussed as manifestations of the major changes
in these cultures, especially in the ways they have been integrated within
cosmopolitan economic and cultural flows of late capitalism.
The first case considered in this chapter explores the dance music scene
known as ‘ruta del bakalao’ or ‘ruta destroy’, which developed in the early
1980s, particularly in the province of Valencia. This scene disappeared at
the beginning of the 1990s in the wake of a national wave of ‘moral panic’
(Cohen 1972; McRobbie and Thornton 1995) around drug consumption and
other deviant behaviours. The history of ruta destroy reflects several features
of other dance music scenes of the same period in different countries; their
evolution has been repeatedly characterized by the broad diffusion of local
music scenes, followed by waves of social criticisms and concerns, which
resulted in the decline or drastic transformation of these scenes.
The second case focuses on one of the most important and internationally
acclaimed electronic dance music festivals: the Sónar festival of Barcelona.
Established as a small event in 1994, this festival soon became one of the
most significant electronic music happenings in the world and a major driver
in the construction of a legitimating discourse of electronic music as art.
Moreover, this festival embodied another relevant dimension crucial to the
shaping of contemporary weekend dance culture, consisting of the adoption
of economic and institutional strategies aimed at integrating this event into a
‘translocal’ model of music consumption (Bennett and Peterson 2004; Dowd,
Liddle and Nelson 2004; Dowd 2014). The rise and success of international
festivals such as Sónar contributed to a profound change in the relationships
between electronic music, space and mobility, as a contrast to the older and
localized dance music scenes. Ultimately, the case of the Sónar festival reveals
how weekend dance cultures have also evolved into commercially attractive
cultural objects, often promoted by public institutions and sponsored
by international brands on the basis of their ability to foster tourist and
economic growth for the localities where they are held.
TOWARDS A COSMOPOLITAN WEEKEND DANCE CULTURE IN SPAIN 177
Before discussing these two cases from Spanish electronic dance music
cultural history, I first explore some of the more general processes that have
influenced the evolution of music cultures and dance music consumption
patterns in the last thirty years. These processes include the changing status
of electronic dance music as a cultural object and other tensions produced
in music cultures by wider social and cultural transformations, such as the
growth of personal mobility, the emergence of translocal cultural flows
and the rise of festivals as major cultural cosmopolitan devices shaping
contemporary musical consumption and identities.
Cultural legitimation, cosmopolitanism and

the evolution of dance festival weekend cultures
This section will examine some of the wider transformative processes that
have influenced popular music, and especially electronic dance music,
in the last two decades. These processes have had a significant influence
on the shift from the local ruta destroy scene to the international and
cosmopolitan Sónar festival. These processes inform a theoretical position
used to analyse the differences between these musical contexts. These major
analytical dimensions influencing these cultures are as follows: (1) the
process of artistic and cultural legitimation of electronic dance music; (2)
the emergent role of translocal music scenes beyond traditional localized
scenes; (3) the affirmation of cultural or aesthetic cosmopolitanism as
a factor influencing personal mobility and tourism; and (4) the rise of the
format of the festival as a crucial cultural device in contemporary society.
The first relevant dimension influencing electronic dance music cultures is
the way this cultural form has undergone a process of artistic legitimation.
This pattern of evolution from a ‘mundane cultural object’ to an ‘artistic
object’ represents a common trajectory in several cultural fields and has
been recognized in music such as jazz, rock and independent music (Lopes
2002; Santoro 2002; Magaudda 2009). More generally, the change in social
legitimation is part of the cultural dynamics in different artistic sectors
(Becker 1982; Baumann 2007). In the field of cultural processes, the work
of Pierre Bourdieu (1993) has been particularly significant in emphasizing
how the allocation of artistic value in any cultural field is the outcome of
symbolic struggles to affirm the autonomy of certain innovative styles or
genres against those that are traditionally recognized as more legitimate.
While a comprehensive history of the social, cultural and economic
legitimation of electronic dance music has yet to be written, several works
have addressed how its social trajectory has evolved from the periphery of
the ‘field of cultural production’ to occupy a more central space in cultural
hierarchies since the post–Second World War era (e.g. Gilbert and Pearson
1999; Shapiro 2005). From the mid-1990s onwards, spaces usually devoted
to highbrow art, such as galleries, biennales and other artistic events, have
begun to host electronic music producers DJs, slowly crediting electronic
music as a legitimate part of the ‘art world’. While historical accounts of
electronic dance music evolution have focused on the role of local music scenes
(Reynolds 1998), the artform has progressively become a legitimate object of
cultural consumption during the last decade, especially through festivals and
other events and spaces outside clubs or discos. The case of the Sónar festival
permits focus on the role of festivals in the construction of the artform as
a legitimated cultural and artistic phenomenon, establishing the basis for
its integration into the economic, social and cultural patterns of aesthetic
cosmopolitanism and translocal electronic dance music consumption.
The second process to be highlighted in the recent evolution of electronic
dance music concerns how music scenes have increasingly changed their
relationships with places of origin. Since the 1990s, the concept of ‘scene’
has become an important dimension in understanding music participation
(Straw 1991; Bennett 1999). Over the years, the debate on the role of these
scenes has evolved to include not only local and physical environments,
but also translocal and virtual scenes (Bennett and Peterson 2004). As
Bennett and Peterson stated, music scenes should no longer be intended
just for their local and situated dimensions; rather, the concept of ‘scene’
must be expanded to address the change in the relationships between space,
music and mobility. While original dance music scenes have been firmly
associated with the participation of a localized audience in local musical
places or cities, the last twenty years have seen the growing importance of
translocal electronic dance music scenes based on temporary events and
festivals (Carrington and Wilson 2002; St John 2010, 2014; Chalcraft and
Magaudda 2011; Montano 2011; Lalioti 2013). The consideration of the
translocal dimension in music scenes prompts a refocus on the cultural
dynamics sustaining dance music cultures by allowing ‘new insights into
the variety of practices through which individuals retain a commitment to
music [that] is no longer regarded as necessarily involving regular face-
to-face contact, or the display of spectacular visual attire’ (Bennett 2006:
223). Although the globalisation of music genres has not resulted in the
disappearance of local music identifications (see Kruse 2010), electronic
dance music cultures have been deeply reconfigured by this change in
the relationships between local places, audience participation and global
cultural flows.
The emergence of this translocal dimension over traditional scenes
involving regular face-to-face contact leads to another more general process
influencing electronic dance music cultures: the rise of a ‘cosmopolitan
paradigm’ (Rovisco and Nowicka 2011) in the ways that art, culture and
music circulate and are understood in today’s globalized world. As early as
the mid-1990s, John Urry (1995: 167) described ‘aesthetic cosmopolitanism’
as a crucial dimension in the evolution of contemporary cultural experiences

linked with tourism. This concept of ‘aesthetic cosmopolitanism’ has been
introduced to interpret crucial changes influencing the role of cultural
consumption in a globalized world, addressing the emergence of a shared
feeling of belonging and interaction with a world culture as a single
interconnected entity, especially growing through the relationship with
cultural and aesthetic artefacts and practices (see Sassatelli 2008: 34–35).
Cosmopolitanism is recognized as a key attitude in the identities of
global music consumption (Regev 2007, 2013), especially due to the role
of art and music festivals (Chalcraft et al. 2011; Chalcraft, Delanty and
Sassatelli 2014). As Regev argued, the cosmopolitan dimension of music
production and consumption represents an increasingly important feature
of the circulation of music within a world where interconnections, cultural
exchanges and mobility have definitively grown: ‘aesthetic cosmopolitanism
in late modernity should be located not necessarily at the individual
level, but at the structural collective level, as a cultural condition that is
inextricable from current ethno-national uniqueness’ (Regev 2007: 126).
Thus, to understand the evolution of weekend dance cultures, there is a
need to examine issues regarding how music events like festivals intersect
with broader changes in the circulation and consumption of culture at the
global level.
Another process connected with the changes in electronic dance music
cultures is the emergence and consolidation of the ‘festival’ as a crucial
model of musical participation. The rising relevance of festivals in the last
two decades concerns not only the field of electronic dance music and
popular music in general, but also represents a wider cultural tendency
recognizable in cinema, literature, visual art, books and print (see Giorgi,
Sassatelli and Delanty 2011). Thus, the format of the ‘international music
festival’ has acquired a pivotal status in different music genres, such as
the Reading, Leeds and Glastonbury festivals in the United Kingdom and
Lollapalooza in the United States for rock music. As Tim Dowd (2014)
has outlined in relation to the field of progressive rock, music festivals
increasingly became crucial infrastructures for music scenes and musical
identities at both local and translocal levels. Moreover, by focusing on
the growing importance of festivals as scenes, we can also recognize how
festival-based, translocal scenes are able to develop a form of ‘boundary
work’ to actively shape musical identities and values (Dowd, Liddle and
Nelson 2004; see also Lamont and Molnàr 2002). This boundary work
involves conscious and deliberate cultural, economic and artistic choices,
which contribute to reconfiguring the articulations of musical genres and
scenes. As the case of the Sónar festival will demonstrate, boundary work
related to the construction of artistic legitimacy is central to the means by
which the festival has contributed to the reconfiguration of weekend dance
culture.
For this reason, and by contrast to original local music scenes – in the case
of rock music in Seattle, see Bell (1998) or the case of psytrance around the
world, see St John (2010) – contemporary translocal, festival-based scenes
are often part of economic strategies and cultural politics at the national
or urban levels (see also Bracalente et al. 2011). In this regard, Gibson and
Connell (2012) argued that in Australia, music festivals influence regional
development policies because they have direct economic impact and produce
relevant benefits for the local community. One of the most important
implications of the rising role of festival-based scenes is that identities
are no longer dependent on local self-promoted musical economies alone,
but are increasingly integrated into wider political, cultural and economic
strategies that are crucial for the maintenance of these typically expensive
and organizationally complex events. Perhaps, one of the most influential
changes resulting from this situation is that electronic dance music scenes
have become resources for institutional promotional activity and local
economic development.
The intersection of these different dimensions influencing weekend dance
cultures – cultural legitimation, translocal music scenes, cosmopolitanism
and the institutionalisation of festivals – assists our understanding of the
reconfiguration of dance music event cultures in Spain from the 1980s to
the present.
From moral panic to the museum: The ruta

destroy
The ruta destroy (‘road of destruction’) was one of the first and largest
dance music-related youth movements in Europe. This local scene developed
in the early 1980s in the Valencia suburbs, in the east-central part of the
Iberian Peninsula, anticipating other seminal scenes on the continent, such
as the British ‘Second Summer of Love’ in the late 1980s, the ‘Madchester’
scene and the Ibiza scene (see Redhead 1993; D’Andrea 2007). In Valencia,
along the main road of El Saler, several clubs opened since the beginning
of the 1980s, offering, at the peak of this scene, what became famous as a
72-hour-long weekend of electronic music.
From a broader cultural perspective, this local scene can be considered
the Valencian counterpart of the famous movida madrileña, a socio-
cultural movement that, in the same period, embodied the enthusiasm and
feeling of freedom among Spanish youth after the fall of the Franquista
dictatorship. However, the Valencian musical movement was very different
from that in Madrid; while the movida was focused more around rock, the
ruta soon evolved quite exclusively as a dance music scene. Furthermore,
unlike the movida, the ruta lacked intellectual articulation in other fields
of cultural production, such as poetry, filmmaking and literature, such

as through artists like Pedro Almodovar, who became a wider symbol in
the ‘new’ democratic Spain (Fouche 2004; Stapell 2009). Disconnected
from the Spanish cultural industry and centralized institutions and with a
prevalently hedonistic attitude, the ruta has not received the same cultural
and historical attention as the movida and has not found a place within the
European history of electronic dance music. In fact, prior to this chapter,
little documentation existed about the ruta’s evolution, excluding some
local journalist accounts and minor academic mentions of this phenomenon
(see St John 2012: 47–48).
The history of the ruta began in 1982/1983 with the arrival in Spain
of new wave music and the opening of several clubs in the suburbs of the
city of Valencia. In the second half of the 1980s, the scene expanded into a
huge music phenomenon involving tens of thousands of young Spaniards
every weekend. At the beginning of the 1990s, similar to the trajectory of
acid house in the UK (Redhead 1993; Thornton 1994), the phenomenon of
the ruta escaped the confines of underground and surfaced in mainstream
media, especially national television. TV reports started to portray this local
scene by focusing on the most controversial and provocative behaviour
of participants, principally drug abuse.
Due to the moral panic generated by these news reports, in the autumn
of 1993, the Spanish government launched a repressive campaign against
the ruta. Consequently, the scene crashed within a few years and was
almost completely forgotten. Since the mid-1990s, the name of the ruta as
the explicit identity of the Valencian local scene has disappeared, with the
scene shifting underground. The ruta left behind only informal accounts
circulating among the original participants of the scene. As the Catalan
journalist Joan Oleaque (2011) wrote in the newspaper El Pais:
Gradually, the ruta destroy, in the circuit of clubs where this music was
created, became a legend whispered among the different generations.
Young people wanted to know what occurred in the ‘festa’ – this was the
name given to the 72-hour-long music sessions involving thousands of
devotees every weekend.
As Oleaque reported, one of the most controversial aspects of the ruta was
that, at its peak, the scene evolved into an extraordinarily long weekend
of music – from as early as Thursday evening until the morning of the
following Monday. During this long weekend, thousands of young people
would shuttle between several clubs in a common area in the city’s suburbs,
alternating musical styles, types of audiences and interactional contexts. Due
to the length of the weekend, it was no surprise that the ruta contributed
to the proliferation of after-hour parties, based on the possibility of starting
music sessions in the early morning rather than at night.
Another major feature of the ruta was the large number of clubs and
venues involved. In the late 1980s, the state road CV-500, along which
the scene was emerging, had at least a dozen big clubs and several small
venues. Among the most famous of these clubs were Spook Factory,
Chocolate, Espiral and NOD, but the most important was Barraca. While
this expansive club was established in the mid-1960s, by around 1982, it
pioneered the introduction on the dancefloor of synth-based and electronic
sounds typical of new wave music (produced by bands such as Depeche
Mode, Tears for Fears, Ultravox and Soft Cell). With the expansion of the
ruta and the coming of techno and acid house music, at the beginning of the
1990s Barraca became the epicentre of a large network of clubs offering a
wide spectrum of styles (Saenz 2008).
The ruta experience was characterized by the extensive use of illicit
substances. Evidence of this phenomenon can be obtained from direct
accounts posted by original enthusiasts of that period on websites and
forums. An example is rutadestroy.com, a website created by a record
e-shop to promote the sales of original ruta records. According to these
accounts, the first half of the 1980s coincided with the use of mescaline
extracted from peyote, while the second half witnessed the huge spread
of cocaine and chemical substances such as amphetamines and MDMA.
After the increased participation in the ruta at the beginning of the 1990s,
the consumption of illegal substances was one of the most controversial
features of this scene as portrayed by mainstream media. Due to the
national media’s alarmist reports, the name ‘ruta destroy’ became publicly
associated with drug abuse and, consequently, this scene became a widely
recognized social problem in Spain. This moral panic was linked not only
with the excessive consumption of alcohol and illicit drugs, but also with
car accidents and injuries caused by the intoxicated conditions of thousands
of youths travelling between clubs along the CV-500 during the 72-hour-
long weekend.
One important circumstance in the creation of a panicked reaction to
the ruta was a TV documentary broadcast on Canal Plus, one of the major
national TV broadcasters. The documentary emphasized the rampant use
of illicit substances and its evident effects on youth attending the ruta.
The host introduced the show as follows: ‘Our programme will take you to
discover the lifestyle of a sector of young people in search of their identity
and constructing an entire world tailored to their own needs … at full pills’.1
Due to the escalating public concern over the ruta, in November 1993, as
reported in El Pais (‘Vera ordena…’ 1993), the Spanish government decided
1
The host’s closing sentence in Spanish was ‘a toda pastilla’, a word game between ‘a toda
velocidad’ (at full speed) and ‘pastillas’ (pills).
to launch a large-scale action against ruta participants and their weekend

culture based on the combination of electronic music and perceived drug
abuse in many other Spanish cities. El Pais (‘Detenidas 559 personas…’
1993) also reported that in the autumn of 1993, 1,052 young people were
arrested over two weekends while more than 100 traffic accidents related to
the ruta were recorded.
The evolution of the ruta is not structurally different from what
transpired over the same period in electronic dance music scenes in other
countries. In the UK, for example, the explosion of the Second Summer
of Love in 1988 evolved into the mass phenomenon of rave culture at the
beginning of the 1990s, transforming a largely underground movement into
a generational music phenomenon. As Sarah Thornton (1994) emphasized in
her research on the UK acid house scene, mainstream media played a crucial
role in creating a moral panic about ‘rave’, and consequently promulgated
representations of deviance and drug abuse (see also Redhead 1993).
Moreover, patterns in the emergence of rave scenes around the globe, such
as in the US, highlighted the multiple dimensions involved in the trajectory
of these music scenes, such as deviance, the pressure of commercialization
as well as the role of internal segmentation based on different music styles
(Anderson 2009).
In the Spanish context, the moral panic arising in response to the ruta
led to repressive measures by institutions and the creation of disparaging
representations of weekend dance cultures that were widespread across the
nation. As a result of this repressive context, the popularity of this scene
rapidly decreased within a few months, and many clubs started to close or
alter their musical offerings. The Valencian scene shifted underground, with
participants abandoning their associations with the ruta. By the end of the
1990s, while the city of Valencia still had an electronic dance music scene,
by-and-large the ruta had become a distant memory.
Thus, the social stigma attached to the ruta not only triggered a decrease
in participation, but the loss of its definite identity. Only recently, about
fifteen years from its conclusion, have journalists, artists and original
followers sought to rebuild the collective memory of the ruta. A major
inspiration for this symbolic rehabilitation was a 2008 documentary film
entitled 72 horas … y Valencia fue la ciudad (‘72 hours … and Valencia was
the city’). Featuring interviews and rare footage from the original period,
this documentary is one of the first contributions to the re-emergence of the
ruta’s identity in recent years. Additionally, local newspaper articles, such
as ‘The ashes of ruta destroy’ in El Mundo (Perez 2010), contributed to
renewed cultural interest in this forgotten music scene. With the increased
use of the internet, forums and websites such as Rutadestroy.com have
begun collecting memories from original fans and DJs. In 2013, the
rehabilitation of the ruta’s original identity and the culture it represented
in the 1980s and 1990s culminated in an exhibition entitled La ruta de
bakalao at the Museo Valenciano de la Ilustración y la Modernidad,

presenting a mostly visual documentation of the golden age of the ruta in
the 1980s (Bono 2013). About thirty years after its birth and twenty years
after its ‘dishonourable’ ending, this previously forgotten music scene was
being transformed into a new cultural object with renewed meaning for the
collective memory of its participants.
This brief account of the ruta and its social evolution offers significant
insights on the cultural changes that have characterized weekend dance
cultures in Spain since the early 1980s. Developed locally and attended
by a mostly regional audience, at its peak, the ruta became a symbol
of deviance, associated with the anti-social behaviour of a new youth
generation. The ruta was also a genuine outcome of the convergence of
Spanish youth with emerging international electronic music styles and
cultures, such as new wave, acid house, techno and after-hour parties. From
an institutional, economic and social perspective, the fate of the ruta echoes
the trajectory of many other regional scenes from the same period. Thus,
as a consequence of the ‘moral panic’ generated in mainstream media, in
a very short period of time this local scene imploded and its identity was
soon forgotten. However, in 1994 just a few hundred kilometres away
from Valencia, a new electronic dance culture developed into one of the
most successful international dance music events: the Sónar festival. While
these two moments in the history of electronic dance music are very close
in time and space, as I demonstrate in the next section, their cultural, social
and economic implications could not be more disparate.
The rise of the Sónar festival and

the reconfiguration of weekend dance culture
Before Sónar’s inception, and in the same period that the ruta peaked and
disappeared, a different scene was taking off on the Spanish island of Ibiza
(D’Andrea 2007). The emerging dance culture in Ibiza was not reproducing
a common model among late ’80s European electronic music scenes, usually
set in urban areas and mainly participated in by residents. Not unlike Goa,
India, the scene in Ibiza represented a seminal stage in the development of a
new geography for electronic dance music culture and in the reconfiguration
of the relationship between music, mobility and place. Indeed, as D’Andrea
has shown, Ibiza pioneered the emergence of a translocal dimension in
electronic dance music culture, enacted primarily through international flows
of ‘alternative’ tourism and ‘post-identitarian mobilities’ (D’Andrea 2007:
23–24). At the beginning of the 1990s, this different cultural and spatial
characterization allowed the Ibiza scene to flourish rather than disintegrate
despite the wave of moral panic in Spain. Indeed, Ibiza’s scene can be seen
as one of the first visible effects of a wider transformation in identity and

circulation, a change that ultimately shifted electronic dance music from
being a symptom of fin de siècle youth deviance to becoming integral to
translocal cultural consumption, integrated in the tourist economy and
aesthetic cosmopolitanism.
By following the path opened by Ibiza, the rise of the Sónar festival can
be understood as a further development of a new social understanding
and organization for electronic dance music in Spain, less dependent on
a local audience and increasingly connected with tourist flows, economic
development and strategies of urban and regional promotion. Held in the
city of Barcelona since 1994, the Sónar festival soon became an unparalleled
international reference point in the global circuit of electronic dance music
in the twenty-first century, inspiring similar festivals across the world. Sónar
has played an important role in the cultural and artistic legitimation of
electronic music, having developed specific boundary work (Santoro 2002;
Dowd, Liddle and Nelson 2004) aimed at constructing a renewed social
role for the artform in Spain and globally. As one of the major international
electronic music festivals, Sónar has been pivotal to establishing this music
as an artistic cultural form. By becoming an integrated part of Barcelona’s
institutional strategy of ‘city branding’ and urban promotion (Ulldemolins
2014), Sónar also pioneered the process of transformation of electronic
dance music into a touristic and economic resource.
The desire to reconfigure the public perception of electronic dance music
was shaped primarily by the need to overcome adverse social attitudes
towards it, especially determined by a dominant association between
electronic music and the consumption of illicit substances. As a key member
of Sónar explained, hostility towards the artform’s association with drug
abuse was prominent when the festival came to life:
I would say that the hardest stage for us was in the ’90s. After the 2000s,
people began to dissociate EDM from drug use, especially in the media.
I must say that the media has helped a lot, because at some point the
media – thank God – have tired of accusing electronic music causing great
disasters, similar to what happened before with rock music. And they
understood that it was a refined musical genre, with a [cultural] base,
with artists involved, and that it was not just a matter of machines playing
music (Georgia Taglietti, Press Sónar, interview with the author, 2009).
In this situation, it is hardly a coincidence that, since its inception, the

festival’s tagline has never contained an explicit reference to ‘electronic’ or
‘dance’ music, instead adopting the description ‘Festival of Advanced Music
and Multimedia Arts’ (recently changed to ‘Festival of Music, Creativity and
Technology’). Sónar’s decision to avoid any explicit reference to ‘electronic’
or ‘dance music’, and indeed what has become known as ‘EDM’ while
favouring the words ‘art’ and ‘multimedia’, is indeed a common strategy

adopted by subsequent electronic dance music festivals. This represents one
of the most visible rhetorical strategies intended to distance and differentiate
Sónar’ from previous shared representations that regarded electronic dance
music as an unsafe and alarming aspect of weekend cultures. This choice
not to identify with ‘electronic music’ reflects an overall approach, aimed at
transforming social perception in ways more compatible with an artistically
connoted, translocal and economically attractive cultural event.
A major and obvious difference between Sónar and the ruta is that the
festival has received the support of national and local institutions since
its first edition. In the early 1990s, Barcelona’s public institutions were
especially interested in supporting the city’s cultural offerings and tourist
appeal, following the international attention the city gained during the 1992
Olympic Games. Institutional support was crucial for the festival, not just
in terms of direct economic funding, but also because it allowed the festival
to use as its main venue a new artistic exhibition area in the inner city: the
Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB), soon followed by
the adjacent Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA). The use
of these spaces has been an essential factor in the ‘boundary work’ enacted
by the festival organization to reconfigure the identity of electronic dance
music. The use of the highbrow locations of the CCCB and the MACBA
has allowed a new cultural frame to be sustained and reinforced around the
artform, therefore encouraging the process of reframing its consumption
practices. This spatial reframing was fundamental to present the festival in
a largely different way with respect to common perceptions surrounding
electronic dance music culture in that period. Thus Sónar was able to create
an event more coherently integrated into the official strategic promotion of
Barcelona, as is demonstrated by the 2009 ‘City of Barcelona Prize’ received
by Sónar from local institutions with the judgement that the festival:
‘favoured the presence of audience, professionals and mass media from all
over the world in the city of Barcelona over seventeen years’ (Ajuntament
de Barcelona 2009).
The evolution of Sónar can be divided into three main periods. The initial
phase (1994–1996) represented the start-up stage of the event. During
this phase, the festival began to articulate an alternative identity radically
different from common representations at that time, exemplified by the ruta,
particularly by focusing on the cultural registry of art and the appeal of
digital technology innovation in music creativity. The second period (1997–
2002) was marked by a significant expansion accompanied by a substantial
increase in audience numbers, particularly from foreign countries, and by
growth in the festival’s budget. It was during these years that the Sónar
festival attained undisputed importance in the field of electronic music at the
international level. The festival transformed into a genuine translocal event,
where a strong local identity associated with the city of Barcelona developed
FIGURE 8.1 Main stage at ‘Sónar by Day’ 2009, when the festival was held in the
CCCB and MACBA spaces within the barrio El Raval. Photo: Paolo Magaudda.
together with a cosmopolitan audience and media professionals from

different countries and continents. During these years, the translocal identity
of the festival was also articulated through the creation of events branded as
‘Sónar’ in many foreign capitals around the world. Finally, the third period
(2003–present) has been marked by a stabilization in the festival’s audience,
management strategies and cultural identity (Oliveras 2008; Colombo and
Magaudda 2010). In this more recent stage, the innovations have mainly
concerned the creation of new musical sections, e.g. ‘SónarKids’ (a section
devoted to children) in 2009 and ‘Sonar +D’, in 2012, a distinctive section
based on conferences and talks and focused on the relationships between
creativity and technology.
The boundary work enacted by the festival to reframe identity also
involved the development of multiple aesthetics and musical genres within
the festival. Sónar has developed a distinct sensibility in electronic music,
which reflects the more general evolution and hybridization of electronic
music genres in the late 1990s and 2000s. Thus, the festival has managed
to balance at least two attitudes in electronic music. On the one hand, the
festival maintained the original focus on dancing and nightlife, a dimension
especially embodied by the presence of famous DJs and of well attended
nightly dance events in the festival’s program. On the other hand, Sónar
chose to increasingly blend this dance-oriented attitude with artists and
acts expressing different musical traditions, like rock, world music and
experimental and highbrow electronic music, also including conferences,
debates and art exhibitions in the program.
Since the early years of Sónar, one of its most evident strategies to
achieve a balance between its different music ‘souls’ has been to structure
the festival’s rhythms and spaces in a distinctive way. In order to achieve
this, the main approach has been to split the event into two main separate
programmes, with distinctive places and times. The first section is a ‘by
day’ version, organized originality in the exhibition spaces of CCCB and
MACBA (but moved in 2013 in another location), with smaller musical
events, often more sophisticated in terms of their artistic milieu and
complemented with electronic dance music-related art exhibitions and
meetings for professionals. The second section is a ‘by night’ version,
hosted outside the centre of the city in the huge city fair buildings in the
municipality of l’Hospitalet, with a capacity of 20,000 people a night.
These two sections, Sónar by Day and Sónar by Night, clearly reflect the
main strategy to distinguish Sónar’s identity and the ability of the festival
to project a model of consumption alternative to the adverse stereotype
previously embodied by the ruta.
This alternative articulation of electronic dance music culture, and its
consequent inclusion among legitimate and socially respected forms of
cultural consumption, represents a crucial ‘obligatory passage point’ (Callon
1986) in reconfiguring the original identity and transcending the stigma
associated with the age of the ruta. This was possible through the adoption
of a cultural politics based on sustaining the artistic dimensions of dance
music, as well as through the selection of specific content within the festival.
One clear manifestation of this strategy can be recognized, for example,
when in 2002 Sónar premiered within its programme one of the earliest high-
profile art exhibitions devoted to electronic dance music culture, entitled:
Sonic Process: A New Geography of Sound, held at the MACBA. This
event, which included artists and DJs such as Scanner, Richard Dorfmeister
and Coldcut, was one of the most influential art exhibitions expressly
devoted to the culture in Europe (see Proceso Sonico 2003) and was later
presented in other European centres for contemporary art, including the
Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Podewil in Berlin. The inclusion of this
exhibition among Sónar activities in 2002 could be considered a symbolic
turning point in the process of the construction of electronic dance music as
an art object finally integrated into international cultural tourism flows and
in patterns of cosmopolitan cultural consumption.
Since the 2000s, Sónar has been increasingly recognized by the media,
audience and institutions certainly not as an epiphenomenon of youth
deviance, but as an artistic event with relevant economic and touristic
appeal, integrated into Barcelona’s project of becoming a leading global

tourist destination. The construction of this festival as an economic and
tourist attraction was made possible by the festival organization’s careful
management of local relationships and opportunities. First of all, the festival
developed an active strategy to enhance the economic significance of the
festival for the city economy. For instance, in 2004, it commissioned an
economic report on the direct and indirect economic benefits produced by
the festival for the local economy. The report claimed that ‘in terms of directly
generated income, local spin-offs, media exposure and public perception,
[Sónar made] a bigger impact on Barcelona’s economy than the mass-scale
Forum for Culture of 2004’ (see Van der Borg and Russo 2008: 10).
This economic appeal of the event in terms of both economic impact and
international projection of the Barcelona brand explains why Sónar received
growing support from local and regional public institutions, despite public
criticisms concerning the impact of thousands of excited festival attendees on
the residential district of El Raval. In addition, it is worth noting that over the
years the festival’s budget has mainly relied on private sponsorships (often
from large multinational firms such as Adidas, Levi’s, Swatch and Vodafone)
and ticket sales, rather than direct public funding. This condition has enabled
the festival’s financial independence, which was crucial for organizers to
develop their own cultural strategies aimed to balance different identities
and instances – for example, to find a balance between artistic expectations
and hedonism and between subcultural affiliations and global tourist flows.
All of these strategies and arrangements have allowed the festival to
develop a translocal and cosmopolitan event, attended for the most part
by audiences from foreign countries and largely disconnected from the
traditional local music scene. The translocal dimension of Sónar relies not
only on the mostly international audience attending the festival in Barcelona,
but also on another strategy enacted by the festival, namely the organization
of events labelled ‘Sónar’ around the globe, such as in Tokyo, San Francisco,
Cape Town and Reykjavik. This strategy has allowed the festival to develop
a distinct identity and to perform an explicit cosmopolitan discourse around
electronic dance music. This discourse is evident in the following reflection
by one of the key figures behind the festival organization:
We are talking globally. If you would like to do something that goes

beyond your neighbourhood, you have to establish a relationship not
with your continent, which is Europe, but with the world. You should
address the international market because aesthetics is being standardised
and the form to produce, create and compose is the same in Japan and in
Bilbao (Georgia Taglietti, Press Sónar, interview with the author, 2009).
These aspects characterising Sónar’s strategies and choices again reveal the
active boundary work performed by the festival in the reconfiguration of the
identity and public perception of electronic dance music, both in the national
Spanish society and at a wider global level. Furthermore, this strategy by
Sónar also reveals how, especially since the late 1990s, the cultural format
of the ‘festival’ became crucial and increasingly powerful in displacing
processes of articulation of new collective meanings and understandings
around electronic dance music in a global society.
Conclusion: The rise of festivals and

the reconfiguration of weekend dance cultures
The two cases discussed in this chapter – the ruta and the Sónar festival –
are expression of different incarnations of electronic dance music cultures,
approximate in time and space, but also very different in their overall outcome
and in how they have been integrated in their respective social, economic
and cultural contexts. A comparison between these two Spanish dance
culture moments reveals how, in the last twenty years, these cultures have
undergone a deeper reconfiguration at multiple levels. This reconfiguration
regards primarily the way electronic dance music has undergone a process
of legitimation, maturing into a largely socially accepted leisure practice. It
also intersects with the emergence of an ‘aesthetic cosmopolitanism’ and of
the increasing relevance of translocal processes connected with electronic
dance music, which has become integral to contemporary cosmopolitan
culture. Finally, this reconfiguration is implicated in the way electronic
dance music festivals have become assets in the global youth tourism
economy, a resource often explicitly appropriated by political institutions
to promote their agendas. In short, by addressing the differences between
these two disparate junctures in Spanish dance music history, the chapter
provided grounded insights on the transformative trajectory of weekend
dance culture, making evident the movement towards its integration within
the economic, institutional and aesthetic patterns of cosmopolitanism.
This trajectory from the ruta to the Sónar also helps to expand our
understanding of the historical role the ‘festival’ in the evolution of
electronic dance music identities and practices. The raising of the format
of international, short-term festivals reveals substantial changes in the
social organization of electronic dance music, which has today adopted the
‘festival’, in its different forms, as a key situated dimension for participation
in its cultures. If festivals allow – as Bennett and Woodward (2014: 12) have
recently put it – ‘a collective outpouring of a commonly articulated form
of socio-cultural identity’, this chapter has not only pointed out the pivotal
role of the Sónar festival in shaping socio-cultural identity, but has more
generally highlighted the complex forces intersecting in the ‘festivalization’
of weekend dance cultures.
Acknowledgements
The chapter is partially based on the author’s fieldwork carried out for the
EU funded research ‘Euro-festival – Art festivals and the European public
culture’ (2008–2010), which focused on several events including music,
literature, film and urban mixed-arts (for details, see Giorgi, Sassatelli and
Delanty 2011). Thanks to Marco Santoro, who coordinated the research
project; to Alba Colombo for collaborating in the case study on Sónar; and to
Jasper Chalcraft and Marco Solaroli for sharing ideas about music festivals.
Last but not least, special thanks to Graham St John for his invaluable help
in the chapter’s editing process.
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Vera ordena a la policía que use la ‘ley Corcuera’ para controlar la ruta del bakalao
(1993), El Pais, 9 November.
CHAPTER NINE
Being-Scene at MUTEK:
Remixing Spaces of Gender
and Ethnicity in Electronic Music
Performance
tobias c. van Veen
Founded in 2000, MUTEK is one of North America’s pioneering electronic

music festivals, coupling audiovisual experiments in media arts with dancefloor-
oriented showcases featuring avant-garde electronic music producers. Its
curatorial mandate has sought to navigate a culturally and economically
liminal position in-between rave and club culture, on the one channel, and the
institutionalized media arts, on the other. In the process, MUTEK has given
rise to a scene that has evolved alongside and as a part of the festival. This
chapter looks at four axes that are constitutive of what it means to be seen in
MUTEK’s scene: the festival’s occupation of spaces in and around the city of
Montréal; its production of, and engagement with, questions of gender and
ethnicity among its performers and publics; its relationship with Canadian
technoculture; and its curatorial policy that excludes DJ performance.
Seriously ekstatic: MUTEK and the scene

of communitas
In May 2014, Montréal’s MUTEK festival of electronic music and ‘digital
culture’ celebrated its 15th anniversary. Listed as one of the world’s top
‘boutique’ electronic music festivals by Resident Advisor, MUTEK has
been hailed (even if somewhat incorrectly) as the ‘template for several

North American annual events such as Seattle’s Decibel, Vancouver’s New
Forms Festival and Boulder’s Communikey’ (Nasrallah 2012).1 It is a sign
of MUTEK’s increasing stature as a ‘legitimate’ cultural festival that this
observation takes place not in an electronic music scene publication but
on the national Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) Music blog.2
The title of the CBC blog series, ‘Life After Rave’, captures something of
the post-subcultural context of MUTEK as a post-rave festival, inhabiting
the timespace of the ‘weekend society’ in which the ekstasis of rave’s dance
hedonism – its ecstatic enjoyment of embodied transcendence through dance
(Hemment 1996) – is focused into an annual, urban event lasting some five
nights and days that develops, through its networks and affiliations, a sense
of communitas – the ‘universal connection between participants’ (Olaveson
2004: 87) that arises upon and beyond the dancefloor. The ‘elusive’ concept
of effervescent communitas was established by Victor Turner, who noted
its intersectionality between an egalitarian collectivity of individuals and a
collectively experienced emotional (or affective) state (in Olaveson 2004:
88–89). Such ekstatic communitas is often at odds with the criteria of
government arts funding, which demand the festival render itself ‘“official”,
formal and serious’, as Patricia Schmidt notes (2010: 30). Indeed, the
CBC blog is one of the ‘mechanisms’ through which MUTEK’s erstwhile
unclassifiable ‘digital culture’ is ‘legitimated’ (Schmidt 2010: 30), even as
the tension between the ekstasis of post-raver communitas and the ‘structure
of the serious’ remains.
My intention here is to investigate the conditions by which an actor is
seen to be a part of MUTEK’s scene. This tension between gravitas and
ekstasis, I suggest, cleaves who or what is authentically recognized as part
of MUTEK’s communitas. According to Latour’s Actor Network Theory
(2007), an actor is as much a technical body (a what) as a living entity (a
who). My strategy is to investigate how the network’s aesthetic, technological
and spatial policing of who or what is an actor conditions the ontological
authenticity of ‘being-scene’. Thus MUTEK’s curatorial exclusion of certain
actors, such as DJ technologies, impacts who can be seen in the scene. At stake
is who or what is recognized as an ontological actor – an authentic being (in/
of) the scene – by way of boundaries drawn around the who or what.
1
My own involvement as a curator, journalist and turntablist intersects this narrative at various
points (see St John 2009: 79–83; van Veen 2014). As the first electronic music curator of the
New Forms Festival in 2002 – when the festival was still otherwise focused on hip-hop and
post-rock – my own influences drew more from Vancouver’s storied two decades of industrial
music, acid house and rave culture than from the then-nascent MUTEK festival.
2
Of course, such observations had been made earlier with nuance by music journalists. It is
worth noting that the CBC blog series was penned by a former Communications Director of
MUTEK, Dimitri Nasrallah.
BEING-SCENE AT MUTEK 197
Though I have undertaken over a decade of fieldwork at MUTEK, having

performed at and curated partner events with the festival,3 it is beyond the
scope of this chapter to provide an in-depth account of each of its rich
and complex historical periods.4 As part of my approach, however, I have
remixed past observations with my current reflections. In what follows, I will
seek to analyse four intersectional axes that are constitutive of MUTEK’s
‘scene’: space, gender, ethnicity and technics. This scene is construed in
two moments: that of MUTEK’s initial gravitational force, during which
technoculture participants flocked to Montréal from 2000 to 2005 (Schmidt
2010: 46); and circa 2008, during which MUTEK had to reinvent itself and its
public, after its initial scene fragmented and departed (mainly to Berlin, see
Schmidt 2010).5 The communitas of MUTEK’s scene fragmented, I contend,
in part because of a tension between the ‘serious’ and the ekstatic that is
exemplified in MUTEK’s curatorial policy that excludes DJ performance.
By excluding DJs, MUTEK produced a legitimating discourse that sought to
distance itself from the ektasis of rave culture. But its technological exclusion
delimited who is seen in the scene – and on the stage.
‘The Media Lounge is the Main Attraction’:

Being-scene
When MUTEK’s first edition launched from the 7th–11th June, 2000,
it presented itself as the first such festival in North America to position
rhythmic electronic music alongside experimental audiovisual works
in listening contexts. MUTEK’s founding director, Alain Mongeau,
had previously explored immersive environments for the audiovisual
performance and installation of new media through the Media Lounge
at the Montréal International Festival of New Cinema and New Media
3
As well as chairing panels at MUTEK in 2003 and 2004 on digital music practices and culture,
in 2006 I performed at the Le Placard sound-art showcase, and the same year curated the
Nettime North America Gathering at the Society for Art and Technology (SAT), as part of
MUTEK’s activities. See: http://upgrademtl.org/cpr/.
4
I did, however, undertake such a gonzo project on a yearly basis, posting day-by-day, raw and
unfiltered festival accounts to the Microsound.net listserv that were summarized in publications
for Vancouver’s DiSCORDER, e|i and The Wire magazines as well as defunct electronic music
outlets Dustedmagazine.com and StylusMagazine.com.
5
By technoculture I designate rave and post-rave participants who partake in the sonic
and cultural development of Detroit-influenced (minimalist/dub) techno and experimental
electronic music; technoculture is an identity and affiliation that traces its historical, aesthetic
and musical lineage to the founding development of electronic music in Detroit, Chicago and
Berlin. Affiliates often endearingly call themselves ‘technoheads’.
(FCMM; 1997–2000) ([FILMS] 2000: 3).6 The MUTEK festival was

initially conceived as complementary to FCMM, with a mandate to
‘explore the intersection between sound, music and new media’ (MUTEK
2015) and produce ‘a true immersion in digital culture’ (my translation,
Martin 2011). After its initial year with FCMM, in 2001 MUTEK became
its own entity, with the festival ‘MUtating’ through an admixture of rave
culture’s immersive environments with media arts.7 Like many new media
curators, Mongeau was no stranger to the unorthodox and unsanctioned
experiments of rave culture.
MUTEK’s trajectory, then, initially departs not only from rave culture
but from attempts to recognize, and to a degree institutionalize in a film
festival context, the genre-defying performances of late 1990s new media –
exemplified, for example, in the 1999 FCMM performance/installation of
Vienna’s Farmer’s Manual, whose artistic strategies include feeding streams
of internet data into generative software algorithms that output controlled
audiovisual chaos. The FCMM created immersive media arts environments
that transcended gallery convention – thus earning the appreciation and
critical attention of an audience that otherwise might not have visited a
film festival or a gallery space. As film critic Donato Totaro wrote in 2000,
‘there is no question that for many of the [FCMM] festival goers the Media
Lounge is the main attraction, with its presentation of cutting edge tech-art
played out within a laid back atmosphere’ (2000).
As I will unpack in what follows, the ‘audience’ of the Media Lounge
drifted on the edges of an increasingly commercialized rave culture,
finding itself inhabiting an aesthetic of in-betweens, neither at home in
successive iterations of commodified rave culture, nor comfortable with
the spectatorship of institutionalized arts. This ‘audience’ sought an outlet
for the desires and productions that criss-crossed the media arts with
experimental electronic music while, at the same time, refusing its status as
audience, seeking instead a milieu of active participation, alike rave culture’s
communitas, in which being (a part of the) scene calls for unrestricted
expression in the co-creation of an ‘event’. With the MUTEK festival giving
focus and location to this milieu, its coordinates began to map out a ‘scene’,
with all the attendant ambiguity of the term, designating in Will Straw’s
formulation ‘a default label for cultural unities whose precise boundaries
are invisible and elastic’ (2001: 248). Such a ‘scene’ is always in-transit,
both in-between its spaces and materialized by them; it designates both a
6
Mongeau has a PhD in Communications with a dissertation on interactive new media
(Université du Québec à Montréal, 1994), and was director of Montréal’s 1995 Inter-Society
for Electronic Arts Symposium (ISEA). Mongeau was Director of New Media Programming at
Ex-Centris, part of the Daniel Langlois Foundation for Art, Science, and Technology.
7
Conversation with Alain Mongeau, June 2002.
nodal point in a globalized network and the localized spaces in which such
interaction takes place.
What interests me here is not the fluidity of a scene but rather the
conditions of its production and dispersion. Because the concept of a
scene remains ‘usefully flexible and anti-essentializing’ (Straw 2001:
248), it finds itself demarcated – ‘policed’ – by cultural, technological and
curatorial forces. Struggles arise over the ownership of a scene. Alongside
the tendency to authenticate the insiders from the out, a scene also describes
‘geographically specific spaces for the articulation of multiple … practices’
(Straw 2001: 9). A scene is a space populated by inventive bodies. The body,
as Lefebvre described, demonstrates its invention through the production
of space (1991: 205). Tensions over who or what is authentically being-
scene arise at its boundaries. Such boundaries of authenticity are often
interiorized in the hierarchy of performer to audience. Thus the rhythms
and flows of a space of ekstatic communitas, where the constitution of a
scene is collectively owned through the active production of a space, allows
a scene to challenge its (interior) boundaries of closure and authenticity.
As bodies flow in and out of ‘being scene’, they interrogate their authentic
recognition as ‘scenesters’.
In electroniculture,8 the participant production of a scene undertakes
a ‘theatre of urban sociability’ through which we begin to ‘glimpse a
cartography of the city’s social regions and their interconnection’ (Straw
2001: 250). Adding further dimensionality, MUTEK’s scene cartography
is translocal, with Montréal a festival node in the International Cities of
Advanced Sound (ICAS) network (Schmidt 2010: 58). As electroniculture
occupies site-specific spaces with sound, this translocal theatre of urban
sociability operates through the dynamics of the dancefloor, as embodied
movement strives to achieve the ‘vibe’ of communitas through collective
ekstasis.
In what follows, I will turn to a brief overview of MUTEK’s utilization of
site-specific spaces, some of which indelibly left their mark on the festival’s
communitas as they became transformed into spaces of belonging. Yet the
imaginary unity of a scene is not just bound by its spaces, but by a sense of
meaningful recognition as an actor within its theatre of sociability – which
is located not just on the dancefloor, but upon the stage of performance.
The post-rave festival is shaped in the tension between its emergent
communitas and the hierarchical boundary between audience–performer. If
a space localizes the fluidity of a scene’s belonging, the stage authenticates
who is ‘being scene’. Further, a festival’s curatorial policies begin to
operate in a policing function when they designate who can and cannot
8
By electroniculture I name the entire gestalt often called Electronic Dance Music Culture
(EDMC). The term arise in Robert Shea’s Discotext magazine in the late 1980s.
be recognized as a legitimate cultural actor – being-scene as an ‘artist’ or

‘performer’ – by purview of their chosen performance apparatus (what).
Choosing such apparatus is never neutral but implicated in histories and
contexts of creative mis-use and access that intersect gender, ethnicity and
privilege. The edges of a scene already culturally liminal are exposed to an
interiorized boundary that attempts to adjudicate the authenticity of being-
scene. That the festival stage is, in this case, not just localized to Montréal
but a ‘node in a network’ (Schmidt 2010: 60) of satellite MUTEK festivals
(Chile, Argentina, Mexico, Berlin, etc.) means that authentically being-scene
in Montréal legitimizes being-scene upon a ‘global stage’.
Space unbound: Being-scene at the Society

for Arts and Technology
‘Change life!’ ‘Change society!’ These precepts mean nothing without the
production of an appropriate space. – Henri Lefebvre (1991: 59)
If Ex-Centris and the FCMM are institutional pillars for MUTEK’s

foundation, the Society for Art and Technology (SAT), under the founding
directorship of Monique Savoie, is its concrete pillar in space. The SAT
was established by Savoie, Mongeau and Bruno Ricciardi-Rigault (owner
of Café Laïka) as the non-profit organization behind ISEA ’95. With Ex-
Centris’ exhibition room la Cassavetes useful only for limited audiovisual
performances – holding but 271 bodies, its last use for MUTEK’s A/Visions
series was in 2007 (MUTEK 2008) – SAT’s multipurpose performance and
technology arts research hub quickly became a key venue for MUTEK, at first
as its primary large-scale performance space and then, as MUTEK shifted
to the 2,350-person Metropolis venue in 2003, as a crucial social sphere for
the cinq-à-sept gatherings and more intimate evenings of electronic music
held before the festival’s larger weekend soirées.
The SAT was one of the first spaces in Canada to equally embrace
the various domains, genres and styles of electronic music performance.
Unlike a club or a gallery, its usage did not discriminate between methods
of performance that reified ‘high’ and ‘low’ art; its space could be used as
equally for dancefloor-oriented events with DJs as for experimental forays
into sound-art. Though such aesthetic openness was in part necessitated
by its precarious economic situation, which relied upon the proceeds
of its alcohol-dispensing bar to fund operating costs, the SAT embraced
spatiosonic arts that mixed club and gallery scenes, such as Mix_Sessions,
founded in 2001 by Joseph Lefebvre as an ongoing series of improvisational
events and seminars for VJs (Video Jockeys) (Turco 2007).
FIGURE 9.1 Jeff Mills plays percussion on the Roland TR-909, MUTEK Montréal
(2012). Photo: tobias c. van Veen.
The SAT is unique for its utilization of abandoned space. Its existence has
been made possible by the various economic crises that have beset Montréal,
leaving buildings vacant. Until 2003 the SAT occupied a former bank
building on Rue Ste Catherine, across the street from Montréal’s institution
of modern art, the Musée d’Art Contemporain (MAC). The cement floors
and walls of the former bank – with the bar’s alcohol stored in the vault – lent
itself to the industrial aesthetics of techno music. The space’s small capacity
of a few hundred bodies produced an intimate environment for MUTEK,
with performances by international artists taking place upon a small stage,
some 2 feet high, surrounded on all sides by dancing bodies and the sound
system’s quad-speakers. This spatial intimacy with performers established a
fluidic space in which a technoscene could assemble itself without physical
barriers separating ‘performer’ from ‘audience’, thereby deprivileging the
‘authenticating’ stage-work of being-scene.
The SAT became the site of MUTEK’s more affective moments when the
stage-work of being-scene was broken. It was on the final Sunday night of
the 2002 edition that SAT dropped its heavy black curtains, barricading
itself from the prying eyes of the street, and that MUTEK, in order to
dance, finally dropped the guard on its ‘serious’ aesthetic. Four nights of an
experimental and eclectic lineup of ‘live’ acts had eschewed any aesthetic
‘flow’, just as the dancefloor had shrugged off dance, solidifying into a static
and masculinist assemblage of unmoving bodies. The absence of the DJ was
noticeable, not only as a category of performer but as a mixological concept

of genre that, in Lauren Berlant’s phrasing, produces spaces of mutual
collective recognition, that ‘porous, affective scene of identification among
strangers that promises a certain experience of belonging’ (2008: viii). For
an inclusive space such as SAT is not enough to engender such belonging. In
a (post)rave scene, it is the ‘DJ-gesture’ that produces the ‘affective scene’ of
a dancefloor’s flow by crafting a symphonic trajectory – a mixology of the
narrative arc – that mixes genre in sound as it does gender on the dancefloor.
The DJ-gesture of guiding dancefloor communitas towards ekstasis, by way
of blending genres/genders of rhythm in a storytelling arc of sound/scene,
was all but absent. MUTEK’s ‘serious’ format that coupled discontinuous
sound with a static scene had ruptured the dancefloor’s mix of gender/genre,
yielding an arms-crossed audience of mostly men.
As the minimalist beats of Ricardo Villalobos, Atom Heart and Dandy
Jack played late into the morning, I scribbled notes underneath the gear table
of the performing trio,9 reflecting in a piece for The Wire how MUTEK had
curatorially neglected the role of the DJ as a ‘selector of musical memories
and a distinct link to electronic music’s Afro-American histories’ (van Veen
2002). It was only when the ‘live’ performance of the trio gave way to a
mixological ‘DJ–gesture’, as the three producers had to improvise and mix as
an ensemble their respective setups of electronic hardware, that the dancefloor
found its ‘perforated points of sonic ecstasy’ and was finally able to ‘revisit
the core elements of repetitious dance music in the territory of the mix’
(van Veen 2002). As I noted then, MUTEK had excluded the DJ by refusing
to consider DJ practice as ‘live’ electronic music performance. With some
irony, it was only able to establish a dancefloor communitas by embracing
the genre-and-gender mixing of the DJ-gesture. It is suggestive that the DJ-
gesture engenders an affective scene of mutual collective recognition, as if
destabilising the stage with a multiplicity of sounds makes permissible a
space of (re)mixed affective encounter that undoes the audience–performer
divide. Thus the technologies of performance, particularly in the exclusion
of DJ practices, come to matter insofar as they shape who has access to
being-scene on stage.
For the attendees of early editions (predominantly white men), the
SAT was the site-specific space of the technoscene – a fluidic space of
communitas wherein the ‘audience’ considered themselves equally
valuable as scene participants, even if they were not distributed equally in
gender and ethnicity between dancefloor and stage. Thus the construct of
the ‘serious audience’ itself, and its communitas, often reflects a narrow
9
Crouched beside me, it should be added, was music critic and (at the time) XLR8R journalist
Philip Sherburne, who shared many of my observations of the night. We met over shared smoke
and sonic signifiers. His account is much more intelligible.
range of participants. Nonetheless, and as Philip Sherburne observed, in

such moments the ‘crowd heaved in unison’ as the ‘brushed aluminum
and bubble wrap’ of ‘aerated minimalism’ dropped away, giving itself
over to a music that ‘was so aggressively present that it became possible
to forget it was there at all – it simply was’ (2002). The nonhierarchical
hybridity of the dancefloor meant that a dancing partner one night could
be a performer the next, and vice-versa. Moreover, performers were not
valorized (or securitized) beyond the reach of participant access. The
participatory production of this novel and exciting scene mattered more.
The intimate dancefloor environment established the SAT as a space of
belonging, where being-scene could be enacted without authenticating
boundaries, tagged by many in memory with the affects of ekstasis. Yet
though this dancefloor belonging was open to all, the disproportionately
male communitas of the stage suggested that its space was not. Before
returning to this point, I wish to gloss how MUTEK’s emergent technoscene
drew from a national, and at times transnational migration of DJs and
VJs, music producers, curators and writers to Montréal, precisely because
of the availability of open space and the access to being-scene such
nonhierarchical spaces afforded.
Bohemia and bureaucracy: Funding the city

of festivals
A bilingual and international city, Montréal is situated within a
predominantly French province with a history of separatist political
movements. Though the last referendum on separation in 1995 resulted
in a closely contested decision to remain a part of Canada, that just 50.6
per cent voted Yes (Turcotte 1996) has led in part to prolonged economic
uncertainty over Québec’s ‘neverendum’ (Bryant 2014; Kelly-Gagnon
2014). Such economic instability has perpetuated both the reality and
the myth of Montréal as a refuge for artists and galleries with its low-
rent opportunities for cheap living and cultural infrastructure. Tourism
Montréal has capitalized upon this reputation by promoting itself as a ‘City
of Festivals’, with arts funding to support festival development and a city
culture amenable to the closing of major streets (see van Veen 2009). It is
in this milieu that MUTEK, as an ‘emergent cultural form’, struggled to
establish itself as a ‘serious’ festival, its ‘digital culture’ programming often
too eclectic for ‘the existing division of artistic disciplines within funding
policy’ (Schmidt 2010: 23).
As a destination for Canada’s ‘white-anglo bohemia’, Geoff Stahl writes
that Montréal’s cultural and political volatility produce an ‘idealized vision
of culturally centred urban life to which artists and those not happy with “the
system” continue to gravitate’ (2001: 101). I have materialized this ‘concrete

ideal’ in the previous depiction of the SAT. The complexities of being-scene
at MUTEK attest to the various forces at work – including external funding
factors – in constructing such an ideal space. The gravitational forces of
the bohemian ideal are observable around MUTEK, as it operated as a
localising space for Canada’s technoculture from 2000 through 2005.
But the SAT itself was also a concrete space for this pull – that is, a
place – as an infrastructural carte blanche for technocultural soundings
that defied boundaries of the officially supported and funded arts. As a
warehouse-styled space in both of its locations (the second a reclaimed
30,000 sq. ft. slaughterhouse, located downtown at 1195 St Laurent),
with an architectural vibe familiar to post-ravers whose non-sanctioned
events had occupied the disused spaces of abandoned capital in urban
contexts – the ‘warehouse space’ of storage facilities, docks, hangars, those
‘empty symbol[s] of capitalism deterritoralized through dance’ (van Veen
2003a) – the SAT in particular appeared as a space capable of serving as
the backdrop for any number of ‘electronicultural’ experiments in which
being-scene meant a ‘becoming (un)scene’ in the ‘ecstasy of disappearance’
(Melechi 1993).
Space/shift: Circulating sound among urban

spaces
If MUTEK’s use of the SAT signals a production of inclusive space
bounded by curatorial exclusions, MUTEK’s tale of scenes, if told through
a succession of indoor/outdoor spaces over the course of some fifteen
years, can be traced in a circuit of shifting spatial dynamics, as the festival
circulates through institutionalized contexts. A scene shifts, sometimes
imperceptibly, as it circulates through space, evoking its ‘iteration within
arrangements of technologies, bodies, and physical structures’ (Boutros
and Straw 2010: 8). With the advent of the Musée Juste Pour Rire venue
in 2003 (in lieu of the SAT, which was in the process of relocating), I noted
the affective change in vibe and the challenge of re-establishing the scene’s
communitas in a two-floored venue with a raised stage where ‘the audience-
performer dichotomy is unfortunately reinforced’ (van Veen 2003b).
Not including the SAT, MUTEK has utilized at least nine traditional
performance venues between 2001 and 2013. Each reified the distinction
of performer/audience. Finally, as if to arrest MUTEK’s itinerant space-
shifting around Montréal’s urban core, MUTEK settled into the MAC in
2014. MUTEK’s spatial shift to the MAC – across the boulevard from the
SAT’s former cement cavern – symbolically crowns MUTEK’s legitimacy
as a cultural institution,10 even as, inside of the MAC, it felt like ex-raver
culture had infiltrated the white halls of high art with its vagabond and
uncontrolled mix of sonic chaos. Surprisingly, the MAC, with its open-
concept space, produced an intimate scene, if not quite the equitable (for
some) communitas of MUTEK’s earlier editions.
If MUTEK has staged a kind of itinerant occupation of established cultural
venues around Montréal, it has also infiltrated public space with sound,
continuing a tradition of public sound system performance more common
in cities such as London and Kingston (see Sullivan 2014). Given the general
issues with playing loud music in urban space, MUTEK’s appearances in
various locales offer a barometer of public reception. Beginning in 2000
with small outdoor performances during the noisy St Laurent Street Fair
outside of Café Laïka, by 2010 MUTEK was staging its first major outdoor
events in the Place des Festivals, a massive plaza located outside of the MAC,
with an estimated 10,000 persons in attendance (MUTEK 2010). The next
year, MUTEK began to sound-out the urban spaces of the St Laurent and Ste
Catherine crossroads, producing daytime-oriented events in the former red
light district around the SAT’s new location, now rebranded as the Quartier
des Spectacles.
But it is on the Île-St-Helene, in the river St Laurent across from the city,
that MUTEK has come closest to a Temporary Autonomous Zone, a kind of
‘guerilla operation which liberates an area (of land, of time, of imagination)
and then dissolves itself’ (Bey 1991: 101). From 2005 through 2014, MUTEK
curated outdoor line-ups as part of Piknic Électronik, a weekly electronic
music gathering under the iconic Alexander Calder statue built for EXPO
‘67, L’Homme, in Parc Jean Drapeau. As MUTEK’s signature minimalist
techno and house resounded to the setting sun, something of a hedonist vibe
settled in, as if the hectic rush of urban existence could be suspended through
the sonic and embodied experience of dancing directly under Calder’s
architecture. It is with sun and sweat that, during an extended tagteam DJ
set by Richie Hawtin and Ricardo Villalobos in 2006 – playing on turntables
with vinyl and Traktor Scratch – that MUTEK’s technoscene found once
again something of its ekstasis through communitas. After years of officially
excluding DJ performance, the production of space at Piknic embraced it.
Focusing nearly exclusively on DJ sets – thus sounding-out the admixture of
genres-and-genders in the DJ-gesture – Piknic became an important aspect of
MUTEK’s reshaping of the technoculture, with the boundaries of being-scene
10
Interestingly, MUTEK had already been recognized for its economic role as a tourist draw for
the City of Montréal in 2006, receiving both the Montréal Prix Ulysse and Lauréat D’Argent
des Grand Prixs de Tourisme Québecois (its official artistic recognition would come a little later,
with the Conseil des Arts de Montréal Grand Prix Award in 2010 for the festival’s contribution
to the digital arts).
again given over to participatory dance. Yet the forces of Piknic remained
contained, with MUTEK’s curatorial policy refusing DJ submissions and
performers playing by invitation only. MUTEK withdrew from Piknic by
2015, saying that the event had become too commercial.11
FIGURE 9.2 Katherine Kline and Erin Sexton improvise live electronic noise,
MUTEK Montréal (2009). Photo: tobias c. van Veen.
Heard but unscene: Women in the margins

of MUTEK
Thus, since its inception, MUTEK has found itself inhabiting a circuit of
contradictory spaces in which its ‘serious’ artistic integrity was considered
at odds to the immersive jouissance of the dancefloor. Though some spaces
produced communitas through the DJ-gesture, MUTEK’s official policy
refused DJ submissions. And though born in part from the bureaucratic
Conversation with Alain Mongeau, June 2014. ‘Piknic’ gained its name from the Québecois
11
cultural tradition of drinking alcohol with a picnic in public parks. As the commercial operation
began marketing to a broader audience, drawing attendees who sought to drink not dance,
Piknic also drew the attention of the authorities, thus ending its bring-your-booze bohemia.
Piknic could now monopolize alcohol sales within its fenced-in boundaries, replete with the
usual corporate sponsorships and advertising.
strictures of arts funding, this (supposed) tension between gravitas and

ekstasis also served as a coda for the hegemony of male performers.
Like rock spectacle’s stage-work ‘that linked technology expertise with
masculinity’ (Bradby 1993: 156), the male body in electroniculture symbolizes
the authentic mode of being-scene. Arriving in Montréal from Vancouver in
2001, I took notice of MUTEK’s primarily white and male audience, readily
identifiable for its unmoving bodies adorned with crossed-arms and dangling
cigarettes (see van Veen 2003c). MUTEK’s static assembly of being-scene
provided a sharp contrast to the West Coast’s techno-collectives of dance
that embraced gender plurality and anarchist politics (see St John 2009).
This is not to say that women were not involved with the festival, but rather
that MUTEK was no exception to patriarchal trends visible in early ’90s rave
culture, where, summarising the research of Barbara Bradby (1993), Sarah
Thornton writes that rave’s ‘utopianism ignores the subordinate position
that women occupy’ (1995: 56). Writing of the 2008 edition, Sophie Le-Phat
Ho observed that though some 30 per cent of the audience appeared to be
women, many of whom were with the press or otherwise involved with the
festival, out of ‘almost a hundred’ performers only three were identifiable
as women (2008). Le-Phat Ho’s observations reflect MUTEK’s 2008 user-
survey statistics, where 38.3 per cent of respondents identified as female
(MUTEK 2008: 41),12 though compared to MUTEK’s first edition in 2000,
the proportion had risen dramatically from its initial audience of 94 per cent
Francophone men between 18 and 39 years of age ([FILMS] 2000: 18).13 By
2002, however, this figure began to approach 2008 levels, with 29 per cent
of respondents identifying as women (MUTEK 2002: 13); by 2005, 35 per
cent of respondents identified as women (MUTEK 2005: 41), a figure that
would scarcely shift by 2013 (MUTEK 2013: 31). MUTEK’s unbalanced
gender space, in short, signifies an interiorized barrier to being-scene that
should likewise serve to unsettle the romanticization of its communitas.
Sifting through fifteen years of MUTEK’s Final Reports, not one identifies
the participation of women or ethnic minorities as a priority for the festival.
In 2008, for example, most of the festival’s priorities highlight its need
to increase the festival’s ‘notoriety and visibility’ – that is, growth – by
becoming a ‘major event’ in the ‘tourist milieu’ of Montréal (MUTEK 2008:
14). Though the Report discusses MUTEK’s efforts to ‘develop its publics’,
it does not focus on who might be a part of such a public. There is likewise
12
The total number of respondents for each year are not included in MUTEK’s respective Annual
Reports, nor is there a methodology of user sampling. Thus, ethnographical observations such
as Le-Phat Ho’s remain crucial. By my own observation, most user surveys took place during
cinq-à-sept events, though from 2008 to 2014, it was evident that an effort was being made to
conduct surveys at the larger venues.
13
Participants were not queried as to their ethnicity.
no curatorial mandate to address the inferior representation of women –

and ethnic minorities – on stage. If approximately one-third of MUTEK’s
audience are women, one would expect that MUTEK’s performers would
reflect this demographic, or that, given the gender gap, that MUTEK
would seek to address it in the interests of growth. That MUTEK does not
underscores Anna Friz’s critical question posed in 2008: ‘why so many men?’
The stage-work of being-scene in MUTEK’s mix:

Turntablism and technoculture
Actors recognized as authentically being-scene leverage an admixture of
constituent spaces, technologies and identities to produce a legitimising
discourse of gravitas, even if such actors transgress the ‘serious’ in the
privileged performance of jouissance. At MUTEK, the stage-work of being-
scene is privileged at the intersection of the stage’s separation from the
audience; the performer’s authentic (mostly white male) body; and the coda
of ‘live’ performance technology. Addressing some of these concerns, Alain
Mongeau noted in 2008 that:
The way the festival was established, it was perceived as such a

‘serious’ event. And I think that’s a bit our fault, though actually it’s an
achievement, as we wanted to distinguish the festival from the club and
the rave culture. So we had to give it an envelope as something that could
be considered seriously. And we managed so well that actually we scared
a lot of people away.14
It could be suggested that the categorical demands of institutionalized

funding, encoded in systemic patriarchy, reinforce the masculinist exclusion
of the ‘non-serious’ feminine from technology/art. However, it could equally
be suggested that MUTEK’s curatorial mandate disproportionately ‘scared
away’ nonwhite and female subjects by disavowing the DJ and turntablist
performance aesthetics of North America’s pre-existing technoculture.
At stake here, in assessing the intersection of gender, space, technics and
ethnicity at MUTEK, is a discourse of authenticity that, when collated into
a curatorial mandate, polices who is authentically being-scene. Its discourse
posits DJing and the ekstasis of dance music on the inauthentic outside,
and the ‘serious’ stage-work of ‘live’ experimental music on the authentic
Interview with Alain Mongeau, 28th May–1st June 2008. See ‘XLR8R TV Ep. 67: MUTEK
14
Grows Older and Wiser’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KhSXr6DW6bE.

inside.15 As observed in 2003, this border criss-crosses others, including

‘“producer”/“DJ” – “white”/“black” … “techno/experimental” – and the
gender roles and their associations’ (van Veen 2003c). Philip Sherburne
observed of the 2008 edition in Pitchfork that:
With its roots in experimental music and minimal techno, the festival
has long struggled to break out of the chinstrokers’ ghetto. Thanks to a
lineup drawing more heavily than ever before on hip-hop and dubstep,
MUTEK 2008 went a long way towards expanding its public as well as
its mandate (Philip Sherburne, in MUTEK 2008: 46).
In Sherburne’s text, the aptly named ‘chinstroker’ can be read as synecdoche

for the ‘white male’, while the ‘expanded’ public presumably indicates a
greater diversity of ethnicity and gender drawn to MUTEK’s inclusion of
‘urban’ music genres. The problematic here, as always under phallogocentric
white metaphysics, is how the signifier of the ‘serious’, the gravitas of
MUTEK’s digital culture, is embodied in the personage of the white/male
performer who, as a signifier of his authenticity, must eschew the performance
of pleasure. Yet, that the stricture of ‘serious’ performance is everywhere
transgressed by the privileged is part of the scene’s open secret – pointedly,
that the exclusion of the ‘non-serious’ only applies to the minority and not
the majority. Thus while ‘serious’ actors such as Hawtin and Villalobos
are invited to DJ, all other actors are excluded from submitting as a DJ.
MUTEK’s curatorial mandate thus disproportionately excludes performers
who have historically utilized DJing as a means of reshaping the sonic
archive, insofar as the griots of remix culture occupy the mnemotechnical
position of the ‘memory selector’ (see van Veen 2003c; Miller 2004).
Given that ‘the history of the DJ is a history born from various Afro-
American and Jamaican cultures’, the policy exclusion of DJs from
MUTEK also underscores ‘the colour divide’ between Montréal’s MUTEK
and Detroit’s Movement (formerly the Detroit Electronic Music Festival
(DEMF)), the latter which takes place annually on the preceding weekend
and which celebrates the DJ as a pivotal force in Detroit technoculture
(van Veen 2003c). It is worth noting, however, that though Detroit’s techno
festival strongly represents the participation of African Americans in global
technoculture (see Sicko 1999), it also disproportionately features males
15
At stake is a structure of being-scene that is not attributable to the motives of a particular
curator. Alain Mongeau elsewhere celebrates the cultural breakdown of audience–performer in
rave culture, noting that ‘it wasn’t just the music, people were being creative and it was DIY. It
was about re-inventing all the codes. Even the sound was never from stage to audience. Now
we’ve kind of lost that’ (Hewings 2008). However, this begs the question as to why such loss is
being accepted as a fait accompli.
(DJ Cyan, in Le-Phat Ho 2008).16 As Le-Phat Ho summarizes, ‘the lack of

representation of women in electronic music circuits clearly goes beyond
MUTEK’ (2008).
Thus the curatorial boundaries of being-scene are unevenly applied. Male
producers invited by the festival have routinely DJ’ed, while performers
who utilize the turntable for ‘experimental’ performance other than dance
music are likewise deemed legitimate. By privileging ‘artistic’ usages of
the turntable for non-rhythmic improvisation and performance, MUTEK
adheres to canonical Western musical traditions, exemplified in electro-
acoustic and acousmatic music, that exclude rhythm from ‘serious’ music
(see van Veen 2003d). Such traditions exclude the pioneering creative mis-
use of the playback-only turntable for the manipulation of rhythmic sonic
archives, predominantly by African American, Jamaican and Afrodiasporic
artists in the 1970s (see Chang 2005; Veal 2007), and by Delia Derbyshire
at the BBC Radiophonic Lab in the 1960s to create popular science fiction
music (see Rodgers 2010; Olszanowski 2011).
As a constitutive actor to being-scene, the technical object in electronic
music performance is not without its ‘scripting’ (Akrich 1992) in codes of
gender and ethnicity; likewise, technology is always put to creative mis-use,
or ‘de-scripted’ by a particular assemblage of actors in a sociohistorical
context. The assemblage of turntables/mixer is not just attached to ‘club
and rave culture’, the two domains MUTEK sought to distinguish itself from
its outset; turntablism also signifies the unconventional and outsider arts of
minoritarian aesthetic practice, particularly as a ‘memory selector’ of the
Afrodiaspora. By excluding DJ technologies from the submission process
of (new) artists playing rhythmic electronic music, the ‘serious’ juncture of
aesthetic and fiscal policy have refused to recognize not just a what but a
who from being-scene.
The cultural conditions of possibility for MUTEK:

Technoculture in Canada
Why then did MUTEK seek to distance itself from rave culture? Though
aware of its electronic music producers, MUTEK did not stem from Canada’s
1990s-era technoculture – the national network of producers, collectives,
curators and turntablists gathered around web portal Techno.ca (1998–
2004), whose conceptual audiovisual events sought to showcase, by contrast
Montréal’s DJ Cyan reported to Le-Phat Ho that she only saw four women out of the
16
approximately one hundred DJs at Movement 2008.

to an increasingly commercialized rave scene, the more experimental edges

of electronic music (see McCall 2001). In the case of Vancouver techno
collective <ST>,17 such Gesamkuntswerk events pursued ‘a free sonic “zone”
that could not be marketed and which refused representation’ (St John 2009:
81). Part of MUTEK’s isolation from this radical technoculture network is
in part due to the French/English language divide that, especially before the
widespread adoption of the internet in the late 1990s, distanced Québec
from Anglo Canadian cultural developments and vice-versa; but it is also
because MUTEK began in an institutional rather than a (post)subcultural
context. That very few French-speaking, Québecois members were present
on Techno.ca’s email listservs underscores how ‘anglo bohemia’ was also
represented digitally in Canadian technoculture.
Adherents of the Technolist closely followed developments in the
formative house and techno genres of electronic dance music – Detroit
techno, electro, Chicago and New York house, as well as its American,
Canadian and European offshoots – that pay particular homage to the
founding city-scenes of African American and Afrodiasporic DJs and
producers (see Sicko 1999). Many technoheads saw themselves as furthering
Afrofuturist electronic music traditions, particularly those aligned with
Detroit’s Underground Resistance, in which black science fiction provided
the mythological context for techno music (see Eshun 1999; van Veen 2013;
Womack 2013).
The demanding virtuosity of technoculture DJ performance deserve
attention. As techno tracks themselves often explore the subtle and shifting
repetitions of percussive loops, DJs cannot rely upon the unaltered playback
of a single track to perform the affective labour required to move bodies
upon the dancefloor. Technoculture DJs thus have to utilize the total
skillset of turntable mixology – EQing, cutting, scratching and the fast or
long mixing of multiple turntables, with the use of effects (see Fikentscher
2003) – to perform a multilayered, ever-shifting sonic tapestry of techno
records capable of sustaining the dancefloor’s vibe. Of course, such records
are produced in a reciprocal relationship to the advanced skillsets of
technoculture turntablists. The ability to perform ‘live’ such advanced DJ
techniques establish aesthetic criteria for technoculture performance.
When MUTEK launched in 2000, it quickly drew the attention and
attendance of technoculture participants nationally, who interpreted MUTEK
as creating a space for the artistic evolution of Canadian technoculture.
The relationship MUTEK developed with Canadian technoculture, however,
became strained when facing MUTEK’s curatorial mandate, which from the
first edition focused solely on ‘live electronic music performance’. It had
Of which I was a member. See St John (2009: ch. 3).

17
FIGURE 9.3 Mossa plays percussion on amplified fruit, MUTEK Montréal (2014).

Photo: tobias c. van Veen.
the effect of devaluing the technical and performative skillset of techno-

turntablism; it likewise devalued turntablism as an authentically ‘live’
performance and suggested to performers and audiences that turntablists
were not authentic purveyors of ‘serious’ electronic music culture.
Laptop performance and the authenticity

of the live
What is it about the theoretical undercurrents (particularly in laptop-
based music) and the networking mechanisms in the electronic music
scene(s) that impede women artists from being seen and heard? – Anna
Friz (2008)
MUTEK’s official exclusion of DJ performance is coterminous with a

legitimating discourse that recognizes the laptop as the authentic purveyor
of the ‘live’. Since 2000, MUTEK has witnessed the exponential development
of mobile computing technologies alongside software iterations that
have increasingly facilitated the performance of ‘live’ electronic music.
Some fifteen years into the twenty-first century, undertaking electronic
music performance has become a much easier and simplified task thanks
to purpose-built hardware and software. Haptic controllers and other
plug-and-play devices are coupled with software designed to facilitate
performance and recording (see van Veen and Attias 2011, 2012).
Up until at least 2008, however, the domain of ‘live’ electronic
performance faced barriers to participation besides those of financial cost
and the masculine scripting of technology; laptop performance was further
marked by a frustrating user-experience coupled with a lack of haptic
engagement. Many established techno producers did not play ‘live’ as their
studios were immobile assemblages of analogue and digital hardware.
Moreover, in comparison to laptops, many producers found techno-
turntablism to be a more expressive means of showcasing their releases,
precisely because the honed turntablist arts of remixology developed over
two decades of historical practice allows producers to conduct a rhythmic
call-and-response with the sonic signatures of one’s technoculture comrades,
past and present. As Sarah Thornton notes, DJ performance in UK rave
culture was seen as more ‘live’ than electronic music acts, precisely because
the latter, beset by a tradition of lipsyncing, relied upon the unaltered
playback of tracks (1995).
The challenges of utilising a laptop in 2000-era performance were many.
The crashing of software and hardware was so prevalent that ‘glitch techno’
and ‘clicks “n” cuts’ genres developed that sampled the sounds of device
failure (see Cascone 2000; Ashline 2002).18 Such glitches were thus seen as
authentic sonic signatures of the live. Further, the aesthetic of early 2000s
‘live’ electronic music performance focused on software that often fetishized
the use of object-oriented programming languages. As a consequence, the
‘serious’ performance of ‘live’ electronic music became associated with the
gender-codified domains of (white male) computer science. At the same time,
debates took place at MUTEK and in publications such as Computer Music
Journal over the status of the ‘live’, in which ‘academics are enthralled over
post-digital music & microsound … because it fulfils – finally – their idea of
what avant-garde electronic music should sound like (something that is, not
surprisingly, increasingly akin to acousmatic or electro-acoustic music)’ (van
Veen 2003e). The perception, however, of ‘live’ electronic music performance
conducted upon a laptop, as noted by Kim Cascone, was generally not one
of ‘liveness’ but of the ‘counterfeit aura’ of an inauthentic performance
(2002). Thanks to the lack of gestural theatre of the laptop performer,
Cascone argued that ‘gesture and spectacle disappear into the micro-
18
For example, when I curated Tim Hecker’s first live performance in Vancouver on
9th November 2001 it was marred by a crashing laptop. Hecker jokingly told the audience
‘now you can see it’s not live’ while he fast-forwarded through his ProTools session. See: http://
www.shrumtribe.com/html/jetone.htm.
movements of the laptop performer’s wrists and fingers’ (2002: 56). Yet
this manicured idea of ‘laptop performance’ that equates gesture – a
haptic and tactile engagement with music-making performance – with
spectacle appears as but a quaint reminder of the technological constraints
of the era compared to the exuberant performativity of controllerism (see
van Veen and Attias 2012). Debates aside, MUTEK’s curatorial policy
only reified the authenticity of the ‘live’ in the ‘scripting’ of the laptop as
emblematic of authentic technoscience (see Weber 2006).
For MUTEK, the sole definition of the ‘live’ remains ‘no DJs’. In its
earlier editions, the ‘live’ focused upon the ‘micro-movements’ of laptop
performance, whereas today, it takes on any number of technical forms,
thanks to the fact that ‘live electronic music performance’ has become more
like DJing, with controller-based hardware and software facilitating the
arts of remixing, layering, EQing, and applying of effects drawn from DJ
practice. What remains at stake, however, in this shifting determination of
the authenticity of the ‘live’, is who is authentically being-scene by virtue of
what technologies they perform.
Conclusion: Captured by a scene, set free by

a sound/space
Beginning in 2008, MUTEK sought to reinvent itself, as it strove to
overcome the demise of its former communitas of hybrid artist/participants
and undertake the transition to an established festival paradigm, wherein a
destination-oriented ‘weekend society’ undertakes an annual pilgrimage to
Montréal for the sake of sonic jouissance. By 2008, and for the first time,
54 per cent of MUTEK’s audience arrived from outside of the city (MUTEK
2008). Turntablist Kid Koala, who played the pivotal 2008 edition, noted
that his earlier impression of the festival was that of a ‘very academic crowd’,
though after his performance at the Metropolis venue he described it as
‘just a big party, really’.19 MUTEK is by no means a popular music festival,
however, and it relies upon arts funding that continues to be tied to aesthetic
categories that at best fail to recognize the festival’s creative hybridity of
media arts and electronic music and at worse re-encode patriarchal and
Western parameters that disavow mixological forms of electronic music
performance that take pleasure in the remixing of genres-and-genders to
sound/spaces.
Interview with Kid Koala, 28th May–1st June 2008. See ‘XLR8R TV Ep. 67: MUTEK Grows
19
Older and Wiser’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KhSXr6DW6bE.

Being-scene at MUTEK, then, requires successfully navigating a network

of actors – spaces, technologies and identities – that are unevenly policed
by legitimating discourses. While the radical openness of some spaces
dismantles the DJ/performer divide – allowing for the DJ-gesture to catalyse
the ekstasis of shared communitas – curatorial stage-work polices who may
occupy the coveted role of transgressing the serious by officially, though
nominally, excluding what technologies are performed. Such technological
exclusions are unevenly applied. Leveraging an authenticating discourse of
technoscience, some technologies are fetishized while others are barred from
use by new actors, in an attempt to establish an artistic legitimacy for outside
funding bodies. The effect of policing what may be considered authentic
apparatuses of performance produces an imbalanced lineup of who is
authentically recognized as being-scene. If MUTEK aims to democratize
who is being-scene on its stages, it needs to dismantle the discourses that
police what is being performed.
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van Veen, tobias c. 2013. ‘Vessels of Transfer: Allegories of Afrofuturism in Jeff

Mills and Janelle Monáe’. Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music
Culture, 5 (2): 7–41. DOI: 10.12801/1947-5403.2013.05.02.02.
van Veen, tobias c. 2014. ‘Towards a Granular Study of Scenes at Vancouver’s New
Forms Festival’. Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture, 6 (2).
DOI: 10.12801/1947-5403.2014.06.02.11.
van Veen, tobias c. and Bernardo Alexander Attias. 2011. ‘Off the Record:
Turntablism and Controllerism in the 21st Century (Part 1)’. Dancecult: Journal
of Electronic Dance Music Culture, 3 (1). http://dj.dancecult.net/index.php/
journal/article/view/104/131.
van Veen, tobias c. and Bernardo Alexander Attias. 2012. ‘Off the Record:
Turntablism and Controllerism in the 21st Century (Part 2)’. Dancecult: Journal
of Electronic Dance Music Culture, 4 (1). http://dj.dancecult.net/index.php/
journal/article/view/121/144.
Veal, Michael E. 2007. Dub: Soundscapes & Shattered Songs in Jamaican Reggae.
Weber, Jutta. 2006. ‘From Science and Technology to Feminist Technoscience’.
In Handbook of Gender and Women’s Studies, eds. Kathy Davis, Mary Evans
and Judith Lorber, 397–414. London: Sage.
Womack, Ytasha. 2013. Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy
Culture. Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books.
CHAPTER TEN
Charms War: Dance Camps

and Sound Cars at Burning Man
Graham St John
A perfect moonwalk competes for attention here. That grand gesture is

lost in the pandemonium unsettling the white powdered surface of this flat,
featureless desert-scape. Featureless, that is, save for the thousand blinking
souls shimmering inside an LED oasis, their form animated by what might
be dubbed playa-step by anyone foolish enough to hazard classification. It is
about 3 AM, and I have landed amid an outlying carnival of revellers who
have disembarked from illuminated bikes to tear a few holes in the night.
No foreigners to a serious hoedown, and no strangers to trekking beyond
boundaries, they have arrived in this corner of the Black Rock Desert, Nevada,
from San Francisco, all over California, the West Coast, North America, and
from regions worldwide. Pilgrims all, we marvel at the unit before us. A
sound-art car loved as ‘the Mog’ and sporting the label ‘RIPE’, this Mutant
Vehicle is rumoured to be ‘the largest off-road sound system in the world’.1
A vinyl-spinning headphones-jacked DJ takes command under an orange
plexiglass dome. The pièce de résistance of our hosts, the Space Cowboys,
the Mog has long been at the forefront of mobile sound experiments in these
here parts. Adopting an FM transmitter, the crew simulcast their live DJ
performances from multiple collaborating sound art vehicles in the vicinity.
Tonight, I am in the midst of such a mobilization. All around the Mog, a
mutant motorcade has appeared out of the night like a rag-tag colonial fleet
rallying to its battlestar.
1
http://www.spacecowboys.org/pages/about (accessed 12 October 2012).
I’m at the 2014 Space Cowboys Hoe Down, outer playa (Spanish, meaning
‘beach’), one mile from ‘the Man’. That is, I’m outside the residential zones
of Burning Man, a vast crescent-shaped grid of streets and districts radiating
out from the other side of the event’s towering icon. Burning Man is an
unparalleled artistic and cultural achievement. This event evolved from a
Summer Solstice festival conceived in San Francisco in 1986 to become a
city raised annually since 1990 in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert. To gaze back
at the city at night from out here in the deep is to experience a full-spectrum
sensory assault. Black Rock City emits a throbbing piezoluminescence that
flickers across the horizon, pitching like shore-bound waves, the thunderous
overtures to which are formed at their nearest by the mega dance camps
picketed along 2:00 and 10:00 at the closest edge of the city, in the Large-
Scale Sound Art Zone (LSSAZ).2 The sonic ordinance of these camps,
especially those that mark the corners where the city’s inner-most street,
the Esplanade, meets 2:00 and 10:00 (a split thoroughfare dubbed the
‘Assplanade’ in the 2014 BRC Weekly) are faced away from the city and out
into the cold desert night, greeting me and the coming sun. But now, legions
of Burners, fitted with blinking lights and strobe hats, throw themselves into
the breach.
Burning Man is not a dance music festival. Over thirty years of operation,
evolving an organic ethos embodied in the event’s Ten Principles,3 a unique
municipal infrastructure, and a festal-ecology of sub-communities, Burning
Man has inspired a distinct global event-culture (St John and Gauthier
2015) incomparable to any known festival, let alone a music or electronic
dance music festival. The event is more properly a city playing host to a
signature Saturday night festival in which its eponymous icon is destroyed in
a staggering fire ritual performance at the city’s epicenter. Spatially around
the Man and temporally around its Fire Conclave ritual, Black Rock City has
flourished as a self-organising event-culture fraught by its commitment to
diverse principles that, like Radical Self-Reliance and Civic Responsibility,
Decommodification and Radical Inclusion, or Communal Effort and
Immediacy, share a sometimes-tense coexistence (see Figure 10.1).
2
The Black Rock City plan is designed with The Man at the centre, with radial streets (at 15
degree increments) crossed by 13 concentric streets. Since 1999, influenced by that year’s Wheel
of Time theme, the radial streets have been named according to numbers in the clock face.
While Center Camp, for example, is at 6:00 and the Temple at 12:00, most dance camps are
placed along the outer radials 10:00 and 2:00 (see Garrett 2010).
3
Burning Man is founded on the operation of Ten Principles formulated by Larry Harvey in
2004: Radical Inclusion, Gifting, Decommodification, Radical Self-Reliance, Radical Self-
Expression, Communal Effort, Civic Responsibility, Leaving No Trace, Participation and
Immediacy (For an explanation of each, see Burning Man’s Ten Principles). In this chapter, all
principles are capitalized and italicized.
CHARMS WAR: DANCE CAMPS AND SOUND CARS AT BURNING MAN 221
FIGURE 10.1 The Ten Principles of Burning Man.

The Ten Principles were first articulated in 2004 by Burning Man

co-founder Larry Harvey, who since 2013, has identified as the Chief
Philosophical Officer of the Burning Man Project. With a remit towards
enabling the ‘acculturation’ of the principles, in 2013 Harvey founded The
Philosophical Center,4 which is intended to ‘serve as both the conscience
and collective memory of Burning Man’. At that time, he stated that the
BMP’s educational mission was to foment discourse interrogating the Ten
Principles, which are specifically not ‘commands or requests’ as they ‘do not
precede immediate experience’ (Harvey 2013). In an interview in which he
clarified the cultural mission of the BMP, and the integrated character of the
principles, Harvey noted a tendency among Burners to adopt principles that
mean the most to them while subordinating all the others to this pursuit.
Enthusiasts of EDM are specifically identified as displaying a principled
absolutism that privileges the right to express themselves – for example, to
gift their DJ performance. Yet, asks Harvey, ‘what about your neighbours?’5
The artifice of electronic music at Burning Man exemplifies the principled
appeals to the significance of the event. Such appeals give expression to a
variety of event principles, each among them carriers of distinct values, their
confluence necessitating compromises that can only be realized in practice.
A literalist and zealous commitment to Immediacy – the principle of
immediate experience – can, for instance, precipitate an outcome at variance
to the principle of Radical Inclusion, the event principle that welcomes and
respects the ‘stranger’. For example, in response to Burning Man’s growing
spectacle of dance camps and their legions of the faithful, some critics have
longed for a pre-raver paradise hinging on myths of authenticity and liveness
not far removed from the immediatist screed of Hakim Bey (1994; see St
John 2014), who castigated all recorded (including electronic) music as ‘a
tombstone for live performance’ (Wilson 2011). From another angle, as the
case of the dance camps demonstrates, and connoted by Harvey previously,
devotion to the core principle of Gifting – in which the ‘the value of a gift is
unconditional’ and which ‘does not contemplate a return or an exchange for
something of equal value’ – can unsettle other event principles. While one
might defend the sovereign right of the individual participant (and her/his
theme camp or art project) to give their art in a way that also evokes Radical
Self-Expression – the principle venerating the ‘unique gifts of the individual’ –
it could be demonstrated that such benevolent expressions transgress
Communal Effort, the principle of ‘creative cooperation and collaboration’.
After all, Radical Self-Expression bears a pivotal qualification, especially
pertinent in the case of music amplified at loud volume for sustained
durations: that the esteemed gifter should nevertheless ‘respect the rights
and liberties of the recipient’. In the following, I will attempt the exacting
4
Burning Man Philosophical Center. http://www.burningmanproject.org/programs#philosophical.
5
Larry Harvey, interviewed by the author, San Francisco, 8 April 2016.
and unforgiving task of untangling this prickly thicket of principles, their

points of contact and resultant compromises.
With a population of self-identified Burners, Black Rock City’s population
is typically white, middle class and highly educated, including a great many
Silicon Valley professionals and other ‘cultural creatives’. Given its highly
ritualized framework, Black Rock City is ‘home’ to a multitude whose
commitment towards the event share similarities with the behaviour of
pilgrims (Gilmore 2010), although the many rituals performed within the
event, including those on Burn Night, are ‘rituals without dogma’. They are
events deliberately open to interpretation and co-ownership by the population
at large, and are thus at a considerable remove from the character of pilgrim
rites to and in the sacred centres of mainline religious traditions. Nevertheless,
Burning Man is infused with a distinct sacrality, and shares another element
typical to traditional pilgrimage destinations – contestation. That is, the event
attracts a heterogeneous population carrying manifold expectations and
intentions, who operate across varied principles and aesthetics, a multiplicity
evident in volunteer organizations, theme camps, art projects, build teams
and specifically evident, as explored in this chapter, in the field of electronic
dance music. In this way, Burning Man possesses some comparable traits
to Australia’s long-running alternative lifestyle festival, ConFest, an event
characterized by disparate participant expectations, competing definitions
and cooperative efforts to resolve differences and optimize outcomes through
the operation of organically derived principles (St John 2001a). Notably,
that event was characterized by disputes over the legitimacy of amplified,
and specifically, electronic, music (St John 2001b). Whereas ConFest opted
to prohibit amplified music by the 2000s, Burning Man inaugurated policy
that tentatively embraced dance music and its cultures within its sprawling
precincts. This development saw the emergence of varied dance music event-
tribes, many displaying evidence of the collaborative Communal Effort,
others competing for that resource typically scarce in a festival economy
– attention – befitting of Radical Self-Expression. Deploying spectacular,
mobile and loud ‘weapons’ to charm the city’s population, the playa became
the context for an escalating sound system charms war.
Burning Man is not a rave, but techno, house, trance, drum ‘n’ bass,
electro-house, dubstep, among numerous other styles and fusions of
electronic dance music, have grown to permeate Black Rock City (see St
John 2014). Dance music6 takes its place within the aesthetic ecology of
6
Note, I tend to use ‘dance music’ instead of ‘electronic dance music’ (or ‘EDM’), since, for
the purposes of this chapter, I seek to distinguish the forms of electronic music performed at
Burning Man from that which has come to be classified as ‘EDM’ (i.e. electronic dance music
performed at commercial mega-events like Electric Daisy Carnival). In order to depict styles of
music as commercialized dance music, detractors often denounce this art form under the label
of ‘EDM’, a designation that may, in some cases, be appropriate.
a city founded on collaborative art projects employing multiple media,

including sculpture, mechanical, fire, circus, body and sound art (Doherty
2004; Bowditch 2010; Jones 2011). The city has evolved to accommodate
these aesthetics, and their associated communities and decibels, a concession
evident in the LSSAZ at the event’s outer perimeters, and in the deep playa,
where, in 2015, the BMP implemented the DMZ (Dance Music Zone).
While this sonic efflorescence has not transpired without controversy, and
sometimes disputes highlight tensions among the Ten Principles, efforts to
resolve tensions and achieve resolutions constitute design augmentation
practices unique to the city, and which are characteristic of a distinct project
design culture (see St John forthcoming). As Black Rock City strives towards
optimization through iterative strategies responsive to community ethics,
logistics and risk management, the playa produces distinctly augmentable
event-tribes responsive to this optimizing imperative. While dance music
poses considerable challenges to Burning Man, the Space Cowboys are
an exemplary dance music oriented camp and Mutant Vehicle whose
augmentation has been guided by event principles. Before further discussion
of Space Cowboys, I first turn to a potted history of dance music at
Burning Man.
From the techno ghetto to the Assplanade

Electronic dance music was first amplified at Burning Man in 1992 when a
small ‘rave camp’ appeared a mile from the main encampment, ‘glomming
parasitically onto the Porta-Johns’ (Doherty 2004: 66). The camp was
organized by Psychic TV member Craig Ellenwood of the early East
Oakland acid party crew Mr Floppy’s Flophouse. The headline act was
Goa Gil, who played from Aphex Twin’s ‘Digeridoo’ on digital audio tape
to no more than twenty-five people. Also playing was Terbo Ted, the first
person to play a DJ set at Burning Man even though he wasn’t on the flier.7
Performing what was basically a sound check, he recalls playing on Friday
afternoon ‘to literally no one, with only ten miles of dust in front of me.
It was awesome’.8 The set-up the following year was equally primitive. As
Charles A. Gadeken (1993) reported: ‘I remember going out to the rave
camp, it was five guys, a van, a couple of big speakers, a card board box
covered in tin foil, colored lights and a strobe light. It was all cool’.
7
We’ve come a long way from that moment to 2015 when hundreds of playa-recorded DJ
sets are uploaded on Soundcloud and listed at: http://www.rockstarlibrarian.com (accessed
3 May 2016).
8
Terbo Ted, all email correspondence, 13–17 February 2007.
The general reception was much cooler, however. Ted recalls the punk
sensibility predominating at Burning Man held DJ culture complicit with
‘consumer society … . A stain on an otherwise anarchistic, art-oriented event’.
While playing one morning near sunrise in 1993, Ted was approached by a
walk-in.
He holds up a knife towards me and yells ‘are you crazy?’ And I say ‘No,
you’re the one with a knife.’ And then he says he’s going to cut me or the
speakers. So I turn it down, ditched the decks and circled far and wide
off into the desert. He tried to cut the speaker cones with his knife but
they had metal grills on the fronts, he looked like a fool and gave up and
wandered off. I put on a cassette of Squeeze’s ‘Black Coffee in Bed’ as he
was walking away.
Burning Man insisted that the techno enthusiasts maintain their isolation
a mile from Main Camp between 1992 and 1996, during which time their
camp evolved into a kind of outlaw satellite of Black Rock City. Over the
following two years, San Francisco’s DiY music and culture collective SPaZ
orchestrated the sounds exclusively. It was extreme, eclectic and haphazard.
As SPaZ cofounder, Ted recalls that at one point in 1993 ‘we put on a
cassette of the Eagles’ Hotel California by request of these two cowboys
who rode in from the desert on horseback, they were thrilled’. According to
fellow SPaZ founder Aaron, that same year ‘a wind storm blew down our
speaker stacks, but they were still plugged in and we never stopped playing’.9
Listed as the official ‘rave’ in the Burning Man brochure for 1994, SPaZ had
an early influence on sound system culture at the festival. In these years,
SPaZ, whose members later initiated the Autonomous Mutant Festival, were
effectively encouraging Burning Man to be ‘more like the UK festival vibe
where anybody could bring their sound, big or small’. In 1995, Wicked,
the UK derived sound system that held full moon parties on beaches and
parks around the Bay Area between 1991 and 1996, arrived with their
TurboSound rig. Cofounder Garth recalled playing ‘for 4 days and nights
through hail, wind, rain and electrical storms’.10 North America’s first free
party tekno sound system, Pirate Audio, also appeared that year. On the
windblown frontiers of EDM, in this nascent vibrant ghetto accommodating
the eclectic, experimental and inclusive sounds of SPaZ, the dionysian house
sounds of Wicked and other sounds besides, Burning Man had begun to
attract a variety of socio-sonic aesthetics – that is, vibes – associated with a
spectrum of dance event-tribes.
9
Aaron, all email correspondence, 11 February 2007.
10
Garth, all email correspondence, 17 January 2007.
Besides the distinctions between proponents of varying styles, a stand-off

developed in this period between those who fashioned themselves as true
denizens of the playa and those they held as little more than interlopers.
As Ted remembers, ‘ravers were always pariahs at Burning Man in my
day … . It’s like we were the poor people on the wrong side of the tracks
and the wrong side of the man’. Ted’s brainchild, the Techno Ghetto (see
Figure 10.2), appeared in 1996 as a legitimate outer suburb of Black Rock
City. Gaining support from Burning Man, Ted designed the Techno Ghetto
as a ‘fractalized imprint’ of Main Camp. ‘We were into pre-planned zoning,
using surveying flags to plot out an orbital city with sound systems on the
outer ring and encampments in the center’. Ghetto sound systems included
SPaZ, CCC, Gateway and Wicked.
But things didn’t go according to plan out in the Ghetto. As Ted recalled,
the initiative was an ‘abysmal failure … . DiY gone mad … . Music snobbery
and cliquishness and DiY anarchist tendencies prevented an orderly camp
from forming and the resulting spread-too-thin sprawl proved to be
dangerous in an era when cars were still driving at every vector on the playa
at high speeds in dust storm white outs’. He alludes to a tragic incident
in 1996 when three people were run over while sleeping in their tent near
the Gateway sound system, one in a coma for months. Together with an
apparent perception that the ‘rave’ was giving Burning Man a bad name
in official circles, and that electronic music was perceived as disturbing
chatter for many participants,11 this incident generated an unofficial ‘anti-
rave policy’. What’s more, the darkening mood was signalled by a ‘gift’
dropping out of the sky. In the last days of the event, a gyrocopter passed
over the remnants of the Ghetto, releasing its payload near the dancefloor.
Founder of label Blue Room Released, Simon Ghahary, takes up the story:
‘everybody was in party mood and happy, and everyone was waving and
all of a sudden the gyrocopter dropped this bag, which really took our
imagination’. The delighted ravers rushed over to discover that a fresh
bag of human shit had exploded at ground zero.12 According to Garth,
Burning Man had the porta-potties removed from the Techno Ghetto
before the festival ended. ‘When people started crapping on the desert
for lack of options, someone carried over a bag to main camp … . Burning
Man was so enraged by this they flew over and apparently dropped it on
one camp’.
Committed to resolve the growing tensions, San Francisco–based event
producer, DJ and impresario, Michael Gosney, who once cast Burning Man
as ‘the ultimate metarave’, recruited disparate local sound outfits into a united
front dubbed Community Dance, a compromise promoted on Gosney’s
Including Brian Doherty, who recounts hostilities in This Is Burning Man (2004: 171– 73).
11
Simon Ghahary, interviewed via Skype, 21 January 2012.

12
FIGURE 10.2 Techno Ghetto, Burning Man, 1996.
Radio-V as a ‘techno tribal ritual celebration’ (Gosney 1998). Between

1997 and 1999, the innocuously titled camp involved the collaboration of
the Consortium of Collective Consciousness (CCC), Anon Salon, Koinonea,
Sacred Dance Society, Dimension 7, LA’s Tonka sound system and Blue Room,
among others. The inaugural Community Dance became the context for a
dramatic episode in which DJ Goa Gil was confronted by a giant peddle-

powered flamethrowing drill and margarita maker called the Veg-O-Matic of
the Apocalypse. More to the point, Gil came to loggerheads with anti-rave
crusader Jim Mason, who was peddling the beast. Robert Gelman reported
on this scene:
It’s straight out of hell, suggesting engineering from the industrial

revolution transported to Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. Part vehicle, part
flame-thrower, part earth drilling device, I envision this machine being
used to battle creatures in a 1950s monster movie, or to torture souls of
the damned in the realm of satan (Gelman 1998).
With a pressurized gas-charger blasting flames as far as seventy feet from

its barrel, and a gathering mob inciting it to greater acts of destruction, the
Veg-O-Matic was known to burn installations in its path in the wake of The
Man’s demise. On its 1997 Burn Night rampage, when the Veg-O-Matic
rolled into Community Dance, Mason found Goa Gil directly in his path:
The crew of the machine is tilting the flamethrower’s barrel up at the

console. Gil is staring down the 12-foot barrel of this jet powered char-
broiler. I had to remind myself that this is theatre, or is it? I’m still not
sure. ‘Burn it!’ the mob chants, ‘Burn THEM!’ Like an opposing pacifist
army, the ravers are standing their ground, some shouting in defiance
of the threat, some in disbelief that this could really be happening.
Chicken John, like the demented circus ringmaster that he is, issues his
now-familiar warning over the bullhorn [‘Stand Aside’]. We seem to have
travelled back centuries in time. I don’t remember ever feeling farther
from home than this (Gelman 1998).
Then forty-six, a sadhu and legend of the Goa scene, years before the
emergence of darkpsy, Gil had been selecting from the darkest entries in
psychedelic trance, in a ritual that he has characterized as apocalyptic
(see St John 2011). Loading up from his ‘divine dozen’ arsenal over seven
hours, Gil seems to have been inciting detractors to acts of symbolic, if
not physical, violence. He may well have been playing from Pleiadians’
U.F.O. or Psychopod’s Headlines at the moment the mob arrived to make
their demand: Led Zeppelin or the flame. But the scene Mason and his
supporters crashed was no glowstick picnic. The champion and his army
of Anti-Ravers rode out to slay the dragon at the gates, only to find the
Dark Yogi summoning Kali the Destroyer. Little wonder Gelman thought
he’d landed amid an epic conflict. Was it in this moment – when Gil stood
his ground, even turned the volume up in the face of obliteration – that
ravers gained a foothold at Burning Man?13 ‘Stairway to Heaven’ was never

played. That said, psychedelic trance was subsequently drowned out by a
fusion of breaks, dub and electro-house. These styles were common to the
Mog (Figure 10.3), a playa innovation whose mobilization and networking
on and off-playa care of the Space Cowboys earned dance music culture
a place at – and indeed placement in – Burning Man. A 1973 Mercedes-
Benz Unimog NATO communications vehicle repurposed as a DJ sound-
art car, the Mog was equipped with amplifier cabinet, fold-out subwoofers,
front-mounted three-way speakers, video screens, and a domed DJ booth.
Premiering on-playa in 2001, it had an unmistakable impact.
On its maiden voyage, a circuit around the Esplanade, the Mog was
like a giant mechanical pied pipe piper. Burners, some looking like rats,
ran screaming from their camps or open playa, cheering and smiling,
and falling in behind us to dance. We rolled all over the playa, creating
impromptu parties wherever we went, or plugging into other camps’
sound systems to expand their parties. There was no competition,
no complaints. We brought the party, and the people were stoked
(Lundquist 2014: 139).
FIGURE 10.3 The Space Cowboys’ ‘Mog’, Burning Man 2014. Photo: Graham
St John.
See St John (2014) for further discussion of Community Dance and other early dance camp
13
projects.
City limits: Large-Scale Sound Art Zone

At the turn of the 2000s, as Burning Man behaved more like a municipality
than a festival, the event made concessions to outlying parties. While
accommodating dance camps inside the city became a primary consideration
driven by risk management imperatives, the problem was that bass
propagates across the flat playa multi-directionally. As stated on Burning
Man’s ‘Sound Policy’ page, the event’s geophysical context ‘gives sound as
an art form an unfair advantage over other art forms’. In recognition of loud
sound’s non-consensuality, in the early 2000s, a policy was implemented
restricting large sound installations to the Large-Scale Sound Art Zone at
the city’s limits (i.e. actually two zones on the outer streets at 2.00 and
10.00) where ‘a maximum power amplification of 300 watts is permitted,
producing sound amplification not to exceed 90 decibels, when measured at
20 feet from the source’.14 With this move, a source of outrage that had once
been ghettoized a mile from Main Camp was absorbed into the city limits.
By the time I made my first journey to Black Rock City (2003), dance
camps were integral to the outer cityscape, and its soundscape. The Space
Cowboys were already old hands. Founded in 1997, after which they merged
with neighbouring camp SpaceLounge, they had a free bar amplifying breaks,
house and nu-funk at their annual Hoe Down on Burn Night after the Fire
Conclave. Space Cowboys raised funds for its on-playa operations with events
in the Bay Area, since 1999 hosting the notorious Breakfast of Champions
on New Year’s Day, and running SnowFest at Squaw Valley, GhostShip (the
annual Halloween party on Treasure Island) and their annual Cinco de Mayo
fundraiser. Emerald City 2000, Root Society, Deep End, the Blyss Abyss,
Lemuria, Area 51, Lush, Sol System, House of Lotus, Green Gorilla Lounge,
Pink Mammoth and Opulent Temple numbered among other camps, with
other more recent projects including Basshenge, Distrikt and Robot Heart.
Practically owning the corner of Esplanade and 2.00, between 2003 and
2014 Opulent Temple scaled to become one of Black Rock City’s largest dance
camps, complete with their DJ-controlled flame blasting OPod, a special
chamber part steampunk time machine and part alchemist’s laboratory.
With a budget expanding out past $100,000, Opulent Temple hosted parties
throughout the week, including their signature White Party on Wednesday
night, with events attracting upwards of 10,000 people. By 2014, they were
throwing sixteen off-playa events through the year to raise funds for their
elaborate on-playa productions.15 Opulent Temple emerged in the year of
http://www.burningman.com/on_the_playa/sound_systems/policy.html (accessed 10 February 2016).

14
In 2015, Opulent Temple transferred their main production activities to a Mutant Vehicle.
15
At the same time, after applying for theme camp placement in the LSSAZ at 10.00, they were
denied placement on the grounds that their camp was not ‘interactive’.
the Beyond Belief theme (2003), maintaining its role as a ‘sacred dance’
camp thereafter. Other large art and music camps with similar spiritual
pretences appeared on the playa c2003, including the Church of WOW, the
Sacred Water Temple, and Connexus Cathedral, where weddings and parties
were held inside a neon cathedral. In his outline of the 2003 art theme, event
Harvey enquired: ‘How does the sacred exist, and where might it be found?’
Habitués of the night were answering with their feet, as the Opulent Temple
grew to be among the most popular venues on the playa. Paraphrasing Erik
Erikson, cited in the 2003 art theme explanation, those gravitating to these
temples in which one could worship one’s own body and that of others
were being ‘lifted up to the very bosom of the divine’ (Harvey 2003). Sound
art camps flourished from this period, their success and reputation built
on design and technical innovation, year round fundraising activities, co-
creative community collaborations, and brand building exercises.
Despite new zoning regulations and sound level ordinance, excessive
sound remained a persistent source of disturbance for Black Rock City
residents. Under ‘Sound Policy’ on the event’s Sound Systems page, it was
stipulated that ‘neighbors should talk to one another when sound becomes
a problem and try to resolve the issue through direct communication’.
But as dance camps grew in scale and volume, members of the city’s
community safety group, the Black Rock Rangers, were frequently called
upon to perform volume checks, mediate disputes, and disable sound
equipment following unheeded warnings. Theme camps receiving excessive
sound complaints without appropriate responses risked losing placement
in subsequent years. Typical responses from Rangers stated off-the-record
were that things were getting out of hand. But the issues weren’t only sound
ordinance transgressions – which were essentially an infraction of one’s
Civic Responsibility as a placed theme camp – but the flouting of other,
somewhat nebulous, principles, like Decommodification and Gifting. At
Burning Man, it is a basic convention that DJs (as with other artists) should
not be paid for their performances, as art should be a ‘gift’ offered without
expectation of a return.16 While dance camps and sound cars may abide
by this convention, as DJs can be offered considerable privileges for their
appearances – for instance, flights, accommodation, an event ticket – there
are various ways they can be compensated for inflating the prestige of theme
camps. As camps expanded in size and reputation, competing for placement
in a limited number of key locations, and courting the attentions of a finite
crowd, the adoption of promotional strategies customary to the clubbing
and dance music festival industry seemed inevitable. Crews sought to
literally charm the pants off the event population, using all the weapons at
Unless it is art officially sponsored through the Grants to Artists program operated annually
16
by the Black Rock Arts Foundation, now Burning Man Arts (which traditionally does not
support dance camps or DJs).
their disposal. Critical to these ends, camps began promoting DJ schedules

for each night of the event using increasingly sophisticated advertising and
social media campaigns designed to capture audiences well in advance of
the event. Such was already part of the experience when Goa Gil showed
up in 1997, but once these tactics evolved, it wasn’t long before promotions
featured trending line-ups where celebrated headliners like Paul Oakenfold,
Tiësto, Carl Cox, Infected Mushroom and Skrillex were converted into
prestige, a powerful strategy in a short-span attention economy like Burning
Man.17 At the same time, these ‘names’ convert their appearances into brand
energy, their presence in Black Rock City announced in record label press
releases, and celebrated on social media, blogs and in EDM publications,
reputation-building practices inspiring emulation among other DJs – a
figure whose actions convinced many critics that they were the most visible,
if not audible, symbol of the manifold problems facing Burning Man.
The response to this development has been varied. In 2012, Burning
Man Project CEO Marian Goodell participated in the EDMBiz Conference
in Las Vegas, making assertions that served to distinguish Burning Man
from EDM festivals like the soon to be held Electric Daisy Carnival in
Vegas. ‘I have no manifest control over it’, she stated. ‘It’s really magical.
With Burning Man, there are no “acts.” You are the act’ (in Brown 2012).
The distinction was also being forged inside the precincts of Black Rock
City, via a means quite advanced in that realm: parody. While French duo
Daft Punk have been colossal headliners at events like Coachella, perhaps
even signifying the ascendency of EDM in the mid-2000s, at Burning Man,
celebrity grandstanding is targeted for mockery and ridicule. Indeed, there
is a long-standing joke that Daft Punk will be appearing live in concert out
at the ‘trash fence’ of Black Rock City. Such burlesque promotions have, for
instance, regularly appeared on The Bleachers, a Mutant Vehicle in the form
of a mobile grandstand.
If the figure of the DJ was a source of ambivalence, given its incrementally
spectacular productions, Opulent Temple became something of an on-playa
temple of ambivalence. OT’s co-founder, line-up curator and production
director, Syd Gris, would become one of the most vocal opponents of
Burning Man’s art funding program, unsuccessfully campaigning on behalf
of some LSSAZ camps for greater access to event resources. Gris’ complaint
has been that while these camps are a motivating factor for a large number
of attendees, ‘the organization has gone to great lengths to do nothing to
support music at Burning Man beyond allowing it to exist’ (in Sikorski
2015). Gris certainly played his role in making the presence of dance music
felt and heard at Burning Man, and has not shied away from the results.
17
Burning Man’s status as the ‘ultimate attention economy’ was introduced by Erik Davis
(2005: 21).
‘Most of the draw now may be not for the original communal experience’,
he has stated, ‘but the mind-blowing spectacle of seeing so many of the
world’s biggest DJs playing on giant fire sculptures’ (in Marke 2014).
Gris’ actions were championed in mediations over 2014/2015, including the
event’s independent newsweekly BRC Weekly, which agreed that ‘there is
no doubt that these unique dance venues have become part of the appeal –
and success’ of Burning Man. While Gris was reported to boast with regard
to OT, ‘I would guess we get more people than any big art piece except
the Man and the Temple on Burn Nights’, the BRC Weekly sought to
draw favourable comparisons with other events many Burners believe are
anathema to Burning Man. ‘By bringing in cutting-edge sound and lights,
expensive production, and “big name” DJ talent – despite this being one
of the most inhospitable environments on the planet – these camps rival
many mega-clubs in the Default World, not to mention big electronic music
festivals such as EDC. And they do it all without receiving one dime from
the price of your Burning Man ticket’. In defence of this comparison, the
article contrasted the laudable efforts of Opulent Temple and Distrikt,
whose huge production costs depend on fundraising activities throughout
the year, ‘while other camps like White Ocean and Root Society rely on
millionaire benefactors’ (Franklin 2014). Despite the fact that Burning Man
is not a music festival, commentators reporting in EDM publications hype
the event as the chicest of all music festivals. And providing the grist for this
conceit, Gris is championed, as he is at Spin.com, as ‘a creative force behind
what has become one of the nation’s biggest unofficial music festivals’.
While Gris is painted as the pioneer behind the appearance of ‘hundreds
of sound camps at Burning Man each year providing extraordinary light
shows, massive LED screens, sound speakers, and performances by artists
like Paul Oakenfold, Skrillex, Tiësto, Bassnectar, Major Lazer, and Diplo’
(Sikorski 2015), commenters took umbrage at the effort to render Burning
Man the premiere off-road venue on the EDM event bucket-list. ‘Allowing
the EDM scene to expand at BM has become one of its detriments to those
who started BM before the dance kids elbowed into the picture’, stated
one respondent. ‘Music, that is … local, small, individuals … new DJs just
playing for their own love is what BM is about. NOT large scale entitled DJs
with big name acts. Sadly BM has devolved into just another circuit gig to
look cool by those big name DJs and their sponsors like OT’ (Bryan Smith in
comment thread to Sikorski 2015). Jason Silverio of long time dance camp
Disorient agreed, stating that ‘a well crafted sound system does not have to
be super loud to be effective’.
At Disorient this year [2015] we were placed at 8:00 & Esplanade,

promising a smaller take on the large sound formula we have had in the
past. Walk in the dome, and it sounded loud and clear, walk away and it
was audible but quiet. We also had DJs that were not big names, but all
amazing and unique, a real chance for someone to make a discovery of

new sounds instead of a name dropping DJ set of music they have heard
many times before. I hope more camps lean this way instead of bigger,
louder, more famous (Jason Silverio in comment thread to Sikorski 2015).
As dance camps proliferated, detractors, many of whom celebrate the

spectrum of art forms expressed on the playa that are often drowned out by
loud dance music, were lamenting Burning Man’s status as a contemporary
‘bucket list’ venue alongside Coachella, Electric Daisy Carnival and other
events in the EDM circuit vying for the patronage of the dance tourist. With
the adoption of attention-drawing tactics typical to the electronic dance
music industry, Burning Man had risked transiting to little more than a
cool‑capital accumulator. Early indicators were apparent at the turn of the
2000s, as Burning Man became an essential destination for hypermobile
partygoers surfing the global novelty wave. As Gilmore (2010: 120)
explains, by 2004, ‘Burning Man was featured on an E! Entertainment cable
television show that counted down the “top ten party spots in the world”’.
Burning Man was listed at number three, just behind Cancun, Mexico. Ibiza
was number one.
As a gravitational field for the global raver, Burning Man may have
‘stumbled closer to Disneyesque spectacle’ than a participatory gift-
economy (Gilmore 2010: 121). This critique closes in on the tourist, with
the raver achieving the mantle of the ultimate spectator. This position
may appear contentious given that ravers are self-avowed ‘participants’,
and indeed many commentators have observed that, fully engaged in
ecstatic dance, a collectivity of ravers are enjoined in communitas, or that
which Victor Turner identified as that liminal sociality in which strangers
move in synch with one another, sharing in mediated immediacy. In the
discommunitas (see St John 2012: 74–83), the raver is a traveller of
non-ordinary states of consciousness, a state of synesthetic involvement
complicating the standard temperament of ‘tourists’ and their ‘gaze’ (Urry
and Larsen 2011). Of course, such participation can occur inside a bubble,
in which travellers become removed from ‘the locals’, as Saldanha (2007)
reported for Goa freaks. Such a critique is none too distant from the strong
reservations expressed by Burning Man’s resident scribe and member of the
BMP’s Philosophical Center, Caveat Magister. Dancing at Burning Man is
not in itself ‘meaningfully participatory’ for Magister, by which he infers
participatory behaviours estranged from local context. According to him,
if one travels to Burning Man to primarily become animated at a dance
camp, or migrates between camps with that objective prioritized, then how
is this behaviour distinct from generic dance music festivals? The concern
is that, for dance camp patrons who’ve downloaded the line-ups and who
know the star DJ schedules, Burning Man may become little more than ‘the
best backdrop ever’ for headline acts. In this context, Magister argues, the
dancer may be an ambulatory spectre who ‘adds nothing to our culture or

communal effort’. And in this sense, in the context of Burning Man, ‘DJing
and dancing can legitimately be seen … not as participation but as excuses
not to participate’.18
The tourist, raver or otherwise, is a figure often parodied in Black Rock
City publications like Piss Clear, BRC Weekly, and in discussion threads
on the typically snarky eplaya. The figure is identified in derogations
like ‘sparkle pony’, ‘broner’, or simply ‘douche’, with the latter term
achieving wide currency, and meaning. As a ‘douche’ may be an individual
who transgresses event principles, it would seem fair to suggest that the
term denotes unprincipled behaviour, which at Burning Man is rather
complex terrain given the event has sired ten principles. While some
unprincipled characteristics are embodied in the tourist, ‘douchebaggery’
appears to evoke something more than simply detached spectatorship
(i.e. a transgression of Participation and Communal Effort), but the
infraction of a range of other principles. Such a phrase seems especially
applicable when one acts under the false pretension of being principled,
or when one acts under the aegis of a principle (e.g. Gifting, Radical Self-
Expression or Radical Inclusion) to the exclusion of others (e.g. Civic
Responsibility, Decommodification and Leave No Trace). In any case, in
folk condemnations of the detached gawker and party monster, the tourist
holds parity with the flâneur who strolls the space of an exhibition, who is a
spectator to trending entertainments, a client to service professionals in the
experience industry. In recent years, the tourist has become the lambasted
occupant of so-called ‘plug-n-play’ camps. Controversy escalated when the
New York Times (Bilton 2014) exposed a culture of gated RV compounds
and exclusive concierge services with ‘sherpas’. In their condemnations,
critics argued that these ‘turnkey’ camps were effectively outsourcing event
principles, including Radical Self-Reliance, to service providers, while at
the same time contravening other principles, like Decommodification and
Participation (see St John forthcoming).
Not unconnected to a coordinated reaction to the controversy
surrounding the ‘plug-n-play’ phenomenon, in 2014, the Burning Man
Project pushed back on challenges to Decommodification posed by dance
camps. On 9 July 2014, White Ocean – a camp enjoying the patronage
of DJ Paul Oakenfold and Russian billionaire Timur Sardarov, founder of
private jet service Ocean Group International – promoted a cross-genre
line-up featuring, among others, Oakenfold, Chris Liebing, Dave Seaman
and Juno Reactor. This promotion broke informal protocol by releasing a
lineup well in advance of most dance camps, who typically release lineups
a couple of weeks before the event. As indicated by a commentator in
18
Cavaet Magister, personal communication, 13 February 2016.
the San Francisco Bay Guardian, this ‘slick, professional-looking graphic

containing, Coachella-like, a panoply of DJs and genre styles, seemed to
regard Burning Man as if it was another Outside Lands or EDC’ (Marke
2014). White Ocean complied with a demand to discontinue the promotion,
apologizing on Facebook. In an initial response, Larry Harvey was reported
to have stated that, from 2015, camps who publish their line-ups ‘will not
be welcome at Burning Man’ (Roberts 2014), but the eventual approach
from the BMP was measured, requesting, in an email to the mailing lists
for Theme Camp and Mutant Vehicle organizers, that they ‘refrain from
pre-announcing and promoting your on-playa DJ lineups’, and qualifying
that ‘if you absolutely must announce your lineups ahead of time, we ask
that you wait until the week before the event’. The communication sought
to maintain the distinction between Burning Man and EDM festivals. ‘We
want to avoid turning Burning Man into an EDM festival, with people
hunting for lineups and timeslots. Burning Man is not an EDM festival, or
even a music festival. It’s something else, undefineable’. The announcement
clarified that promotions of this kind ‘create notoriety in a community that
doesn’t necessarily share our principles, and specifically commodifies and
commercializes artistic experiences’, and that it’s ‘unnecessary to promote
beyond ticketed Burners for an experience you’re giving to Black Rock City’.
Given that Burning Man tickets have sold out in recent years (i.e. maxing
at about 70,000), the announcement also spoke to the growing problem of
ticket scarcity and scalping. ‘We don’t want to artificially drive up demand
for tickets that aren’t available, and the attraction of big-name DJs can also
drive up the price of after-market tickets’ (in Burning Man 21 July 2015).
Mutant vehicles and mobile sound

No small concern for the Burning Man Project was the way on-playa
camps were becoming platforms for commercial enterprises off-playa.
The mobilization of sound-art projects in the form of Mutant Vehicles (MVs)
provided a vehicle for this development. Mutant Vehicles are a unique art
form at Burning Man, presided over by the Department of Mutant Vehicles
(DMV), the official body granting MV licenses. In 2001, the sound art
vehicle was an innovation of the Space Cowboys, as embodied in their Mog,
sometimes referred to as an All-Terrain Audio Visual Assault Vehicle. With
an enclosed area to protect equipment from dust and a suspension system to
prevent the skipping of vinyl while mobile, the vehicle gave Space Cowboys
a design advantage over other MVs. At their deep playa Hoe Down at the
Temple of Gravity art sculpture in 2003, the Space Cowboys introduced
another innovation to the playa: an FM transmitter syncing its audio system
with other MVs and camps, permitting versatile operations and mobilized
immediacy.
Following the example of the Space Cowboys, dance camps mutated into
mobile sound systems, growing in scale and reputation like sonic armadas.
This artistic vehicle also enabled new crews to emerge with custom-built
projects taking to the playa with stadium quality sound systems (e.g. 100,000
watts and over) with spectacular light, laser and fire performances. Assisted
by the advent of CDJs, party cars rolled the playa, from the Garage Mahal,
a double-decker bus with DJ booth, dancefloor and crow’s nest, to the shape
and location-shifting vehicles of Disorient, to the massive bass of Robot
Heart. Although this development enabled collaborations unique to Burning
Man, it also saw the on-playa charms war escalate into a new mobile phase.
The evolving artifice of sound MVs saw dozens of these units gravitate
to the Man on Burn Night, pumping out a cacophony of electro-exhaust
around the Fire Conclave, the pivotal ritual event in the city’s weeklong
duration. This is where the Burner population traditionally congregates in a
vast circumference around the Man to witness a series of fire performances
culminating in the giant figure’s fiery demise (Bowditch 2010). While many
accept the inclusion of the DJ sound vehicles that have clung to the outskirts
of the Fire Conclave over the last fifteen years, others are disturbed by the
incremental sonic incursions upon their sacred rite.
In the early years one of my very favorite things was lingering at the
Man’s post burn coals and soaking up the primal scene: naked dancers,
people huddling, spontaneous human level things, and particularly the
drum circles that set the tribal, primal mood. Voices could be heard at
a distance. There was social revelry and group consciousness. This just
does not happen any more. The ring of art cars literally drown out the
drum circles now, and they are pretty much extinct in the after burn
gathering. Any verbal data cannot carry more than a foot or two rather
than a good few yards as in the past, and this verbal interplay was what
made the social magic happen … . I still linger around the coals, but it is
relative to the past, a socially dead experience now because the amplified
music sound levels there kill it, and have killed it (tzx4 2015).
In recent years, the Dancetronauts (see Figure 10.4) became the most
ambitious of these mobile outfits, first appearing on the playa in 2011 with
the Strip Ship, a spectacular limousine spaceship with sky deck that rises
forty feet on a hydraulic scissor lift (that also features a likeness of The Man
in LED). The Strip Ship tows a huge custom-built stage with 100,000 watt
sound system called the Bass Station. Boosted in reports as being ‘the largest
mobile stage in the United States’ (EDM Festivals 2014), the Bass Station
features a DJ booth, speakers, amps and dance podiums typically occupied
by cosmic Go-Go dancers, the Dancetrohotties. By 2014, the Dancetronauts
were attracting thousands to their events, celebrated as ostentatious gifts
to the Burning Man community, likely becoming the most popular mobile
attraction on the playa. Following the innovation of the Space Cowboys,

that year, the Dancetronauts held their Deep Space party at the Pier Group’s
sculpture Embrace, at which more than twenty Mutant Vehicles were audio
synchronized. But 2014 also saw the Dancetronauts at the centre of a
controversy, ostensibly receiving more complaints than any other Mutant
Vehicle in the history of the event. According to complaints received by the
DMV, not only were excessive sound levels adversely impacting performers
in the Fire Conclave and numerous members of a trapped audience,
Dancetronauts co-owner Captain Philthy Phil promoted a forthcoming free
album release on the mic during his electro-house set performed on Burn
Night. Already on probationary status after complaints the previous year,
the DMV Council decided to deny Dancetronauts a license for their mutant
vehicle for 2015 (Dr Yes 2015).
Mutant Vehicle licenses are a privilege easily denied if rules and principles
are transgressed, not least because often over 1,000 MVs apply for permits
each year, but nearly half of them are either not invited or licensed by
the DMV due to limits to the number of vehicles that can drive at the
event. This is the reality shared by long time Burner Patrice Mackey, who
qualified that losing your privilege ‘might be more important to you if your
business was related to your reputation as a portable party’.19 Indeed, the
Dancetronauts are entertainment for hire, their website showcasing, for
FIGURE 10.4 The Dancetronauts, Burning Man 2014. Photo: Graham St John.
In a post to a thread on Burning Man’s Facebook group page on 14 June 2015.

19
example, appearances at EDC, and stating their preferred style as ‘EDM’,

with a promise that the company ‘delivers all of the hottest mainstream
electronic dance music top 100 favorites and more’.20 As the reputation of
the Dancetronauts’ enterprise appeared to be closely tied to their spectacular
annual gifting at Burning Man, the nature of their ‘gift’ was called into
question. The discussion was prompted by rhetoric celebrating MV sound
systems as paragons of selfless gifting. The main protagonist of this position
is editor of the blog Burners.me, who championed the Dancetronauts’ cause
in an attempt to further an agenda in which the Burning Man organization
is castigated as a sinister ‘dysfunctional dystopia, where volunteer dictators
gleefully punish thousands based on the capricious whims of a few’
(burnersxxx 2015b).
The episode put Gifting under the microscope as lively discussions
erupted across numerous blogs, in social media, and on forums like reddit
and eplaya. Some commentators rallied in defence of the Dancetronauts and
their powerful prestations to the event-community over successive years.
Here we find evidence of the belief that those who bring the tunes maketh
the party. This attitude, long holding currency in teknival dance music
sound system circles, and rooted in the Jamaican sound system tradition,
correlates to the logic of the potlatch, in which, in relation to recipients,
the lavisher obtains prestige and power. And yet, from a perspective rather
removed from this portrait of benign beneficence, the Dancetronauts were
opening old wounds – that is, the ‘gift’ of loud sound is a freedom restricting
imposition. ‘Fire and art are everywhere, but I only need to look the other
direction and it’s gone’, was the response of one commentator. ‘I can move
if I don’t want to see something. I can step back if the fire is hot. I can be
a quarter mile away and the fire is nothing but a distant light. But EDM is
different. EDM forces itself upon you, there is no way to escape it’.21
An extension of this problem is when the gift of the mobile sonic boom
box assails and diminishes, even destroys, someone else’s gift, curtails
another’s expression. Burn Night is exemplary, but there have also been a
variety of reports of rolling sounds over-running commissioned art pieces
installed on-playa and burning Burners attempting to interact with them.
Some of these installations have a sound component that may be drowned
out by approaching mutants operating at volume. Long-time Burner,
artist and engineer Christopher Schardt confronted this problem with his
2015-commissioned installation Firmament, a deep playa oasis of light and
sound, where crowds reclined to the effects of an LED orchestra. According
to Cavaet Magister, Firmament ‘was such a success that dance-party art cars
http://www.dancetronauts.com (accessed 10 February 2016).

20
Burner 61, 18 June 2015 @ 8:59 AM, in comment response to burnersxxx (2015b).
21
would make it a destination. But when they arrived their music blasted in
and ruined the effect he was trying to create’.22
Other detractors emphasize the duplicitous potential of the sound
gift. Whereas Gifting celebrates the gift that arrives without expectation
of return in the form of direct reciprocation, some ‘gifts’ appear to be
motivated by pecuniary agendas that not only contravene specific principles
(i.e. Decommodification), but unsettle the entire hive of principles. ‘Too
many camp and art cars have been “promoting” their line-ups and using the
Burn to launch a private brand so they can profit from their ideas and work
in the default world’, noted one respondent finding contrast with projects,
like Do Lab and Mutaytor, formations characterized to have come about
as a ‘natural progression’ from the event. ‘Now it seems that people, like
The Dancetronauts, launch ideas at Burning Man in order to promote it
and then bring it to the default world and turn a profit. It is less a gift
and more a selfish act motivated by money/greed’.23 The controversy gained
momentum as critics, long affronted by the invasive aesthetic of ‘EDM’,
seized the moment to pour scorn on the ‘Douchetronauts’, or in further
parlance, ‘Asstronauts’, and were even incited to near-vigilante solutions to
disable rogue sound operators in situ (Knight 2014).
The DMZ
Burning Man is the crucible of an ambitious albeit principled culture of
design and optimization. It is founded and reproduced through the dramatic
performance of an entanglement of principles that are in continual conflict
and negotiation. As Harvey has stated, ‘philosophy occurs when principles
collide, and we should allow these Principles to interpret and interrogate
one another. Our philosophy, in other words, is muscular – it depends on
the capacity of its assumptions to do work’ (Harvey 2013). As this chapter
has shown, the history of electronic dance music, camps and vehicles in
Black Rock City demonstrates the interactive application of these principles,
including those that have a tendency to collide. I conclude by drawing
attention to a further example: the DMZ. To address growing concerns of
rogue MVs blasting an unconsenting populace, while also responding to
Bureau of Land Management (BLM) sanitation management issues,24 in
22
Caveat Magister, personal communication, 8 February 2016.
23
Peeps, 14 June 2015 @ 9:46 AM, in comment response to burnersxxx (2015a).
24
The BLM is responsible for issuing a Special Recreation Permit, and to obtain a SRP each year
Burning Man is obligated to meet concerns raised by the BLM. In a report (Seidlitz 2015), the
BLM reported ‘human waste on the open playa associated with mobile rave participants who
did not have convenient access to portable toilets’.
2015 Burning Man introduced the DMZ. At that time, it was clarified that
MVs classified as ‘Level 3’ or ‘Large Dance Club, Arena, Stadium (100 dB or
more at 100 ft or more)’, may only play at high volume in the LSSAZ areas
at 10.00 and 2.00 as well as in the new DMZ, a zone in the deep playa one
mile from The Man, complete with portable toilets.25
While the DMZ met BLM health and safety concerns, it was also
responsive to the mobile drama of loud sound. The DMZ appeared to
embody a mutually satisfying solution for event populations with varying
expectations and intentions. Such measures pose a challenge that runs to the
heart of Burning Man. Communities typically establish identification through
processes of boundary maintenance (e.g. by identifying the other in their
midst, a practice that may involve the manufacturing of an outsider). Burning
Man’s response to dance camps, ‘EDM’ in general, and the Dancetronauts
in particular, evokes such boundary forming processes, sometimes known
as ‘scapegoating’. This is the phrase repeatedly adopted in blog posts by the
editor of burners.me. And yet, at Burning Man, others are not simply those
against whom participants may establish their selves as Burners – a process
resembling the distinctions implicit to achieving ‘subcultural capital’ in Sarah
Thornton’s (1996) formulations – but pose a challenge to accommodate,
optimize and make concessions without compromising the event’s principles.
From public health and safety considerations to the delicate balancing
act of its own community ethos, Burning Man has avoided a subcultural
apartheid. After all, the Dancetronauts were not banned, and loud sound
art and electronic dance music remain integral to a gift economy whose
most precious commodity appears to be attention. The ‘broner’, ‘tourist’, or
even ‘virgin’ (the term for first time Burners) may serve as f olk‑labels against
whom Burners distinguish themselves as genuine participants, but if there
is any subcultural capital with real currency in this event-culture, it appears
that it does not arrive by establishing self-identity in stark juxtaposition to
the ‘tourist’. In a social landscape in which principles like Radical Inclusion
and Civic Responsibility conflict, the ongoing challenge in this inclusive
experiment is to welcome the stranger, and absorb the other, through
acculturation over successive events.
http://burningman.org/event/art-performance/mutant-vehicles/sound-policy/ (accessed 10 February 2016).

25
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INDEX
accelerated consumer culture 62 audience 46, 50–2, 54, 57, 59–62, 76,
acculturation 222, 241 94, 165, 176, 178, 181, 184–9,
aesthetic 46, 51, 56, 58–9 198–9, 201–2, 204, 206–9,
Aitken, Don 141 213–14
Ajuntament, de Barcelona 186 authenticity 70, 81, 84–5, 87, 149,
Akrich, Madeleine 210 153, 196, 199–200, 208–9, 212,
Alchemy Festival 119, 138, 140, 214, 222
142–3, 151, 154 Autumn Equinox 154
Aldridge Judith 71
All-Terrain Audio Visual Assault Bailey, Alison 81–1
Vehicle 236 Ballantyne, Julie 149
alpha-PVP 116, 121 bankruptcy 4, 50, 62
alternative electronic festivities 160–3 Barnett, Clive 146
alternative social practice 100, 112 Barry Andrew 121, 128, 130
Andersen, Margaret L. 70, 84 Bass Coast Festival 13
Anderson, Tammy L. 2, 183 Bass Station 237
Anderton, Chris 32, 53, 55 Basshenge 230
Anon Salon 227 Baumann, Shyon 177
anti-lower-class blackness 85 Bearded Theory 140, 142, 149, 151
ANZ Stadium 46 Becker, Howard S. 177
Apollo Music Festival 48 Belgium 3, 26, 30, 50–1. See also
Area 51, 230 Tomorrowland
artisanal vending 93 Bell, Thomas 180
artists 7, 9, 12, 17, 28–31, 45, 48, Beloved 10
51–3, 56–9 Bennett, Andy 1, 15, 176, 178, 190
Ashline, William 213 Bey, Hakim 139, 145, 170, 222
Asian American youth 69–88. See also Big Day Out 49–50, 52, 61
perpetual foreigner Bilton, Nick 235
DJs 83 Bishop, Claire 101–2
EDM festivals 69–72, 77–88 black hip-hop culture 70, 72, 81, 83,
following trends 79–80 85–7
yellow peril to model minority Black Rock City 8, 12, 14, 17, 119,
75–7 220, 223–6, 230–2, 235–6, 240.
Assplanade 220, 224 See also Burning Man
attendees 69, 82, 84–5, 142, 159, 171, Black Rock Desert 219–20
189, 202, 206, 232 blacks 73, 75, 83
Attias, Bernardo Alexander 213–14 Blake, Mariah 124
246 INDEX
blogs 13 Vehicles (MVs);Zendo Project

Blok, Gemma 127 (United States)
Blue Room 227–7 artistic and cultural achievement 220
BlyssAbyss 230 Burners 126, 220, 222–3, 229, 233,
BMP 222, 224, 234, 236 236, 239–41
Bogart, Jonathan 28 city limits (sound policy) 230–6
Boltanski, Luc 12, 148 community collaborations 224, 231,
Bondi Beach Pavilion 49 236–7, 239, 241
Bondi, Liz 130 dance camps 220, 222, 230–1,
Bono, Ferran 184 234–5, 237, 241
Bookchin, Murray 12 design and optimisation 240–1
Boom Festival (Portugal) 3, 6, 9, 115, DJ culture 219, 222, 224–6, 228–30,
120, 124 232–7
Sacred Fire 115, 118 EDM festivals and 232, 236–7
BoomTownFair 11, 14 event principles 222, 224, 235
Bourdieu, Pierre 84, 86, 95, 177 Fire Conclave ritual 220, 230,
Bourriaud, Nicholas 95–7, 100–2, 107, 237–8
112 fire ritual performance 220
boutique festivals 11–12, 17, 93–5, gifting in 222, 226, 231, 234–5, 237,
99, 101–3, 112–13. See also 239–41
Raindance Campout LED orchestra 219, 233, 237, 239
Boutros, Alexandra 204 line-up featuring 235
Bowditch, Rachel 224, 237 multiple media 224
Bracalente, Bruno 180 rave camp 224
Bradby, Barbara 207 self-identified Burners 223
brand management 3, 5, 8, 12, 19, sound cars 231
27–8, 31–5, 39, 46, 51–2, 55, 58, Techno Ghetto 224–7
60, 62–3, 142, 144, 176, 185, ten principles 220–22, 224, 235
187, 189, 205, 231–2, 240
Brennan-Horley, Chris 53 Caille, Alain 159, 168, 170
Brisbane Showgrounds 46 Callon, Michel 188
Briscoe, Chris 104 Canada
Britain 52, 55, 137, 141, 145, 156. See bohemian system 203–4
also England; UK Society for Art and Technology
alternative festivals 141–4 (SAT) 200–4
Brown, August 232 technoculture 195, 197, 204–5,
Brun-Lambert, David 160 208–11, 213
Bryant, Nick 203 Canadian Broadcasting Corporation
Buckland, Fiona 2, 71 (CBC) Music blog. 196
Bureau of Land Management (BLM), Cantwell, Robert 27
safety concerns 240–1 Carah, Nicholas 52
Burn Night 116, 223, 228, 230, 233, Carbines, Scott 62
237–9 care space 117, 122, 124, 129–30. See
Burners.me (blog) 239 also harm reduction paradigm
burnersxxx 239 open and closed 129–30
Burning Man (Nevada, US) 3, 8, 10, Carrington, Ben 178
12–14, 17, 52. See also DMZ Carvalho, Maria C. 127, 129
(Dance Music Zone); Mutant Cascone, Kim 213
INDEX 247
cathartic mass ritual 130 cultural racism 82, 87

Central Station Records 47 Cummings, Joanne 51–2
Chalcraft, Jasper 2–3, 8–9, 178–9
Chan, Sebastian 11, 54–5 danceekstasis 14, 16, 196, 199, 202–3,
Chang, Jeff 210 205, 207–8, 215
charmswar 223, 237 dancefloor–DJ relationship 51
Chen, Katherine 12, 96 dance music festivalization 1–2, 5, 8, 18
ChiapelloEve 12, 148 dance music festivals 3, 13, 15, 17. See
Cinco de Mayo fundraiser 230 also specific festivals
city branding 176, 185 Dance Temple 9, 115, 120, 124
class habitus 86 dance-party art cars 239
club culture 2, 6, 51, 53, 58, 60, 195 Dancetronaut 237–41
clubbers 47 D’Andrea, Anthony 2, 27, 46, 56, 180,
cocaine 121, 182 184
Code of Practice for Running Safer Danielsen, Anne 52
Dance Parties in 2004, 55 Dargis, Manohila 28
Code of Practice for Running Safer Dart, Chris 13
Music Festivals and Events 2013 Dearling, Alan 119, 123
55 De Certeau, Michel 170–1
Cohen, Stanley 176 Deep End 230
Collin, Matthew 71, 74, 138, 141 Delanty, Gerard 8–9, 27, 179, 191
Colombo, Alba 187, 191 Delorme, Annick 161
commercialism 62 Department of Mutant Vehicles (DMV)
commercialization 47, 49–51, 55, 60, 236, 238
84, 139, 183 De Stagni, Karin Silenzy 123
commodification 47, 149 Detroit’s Movement Electronic Music
Community Dance 227–9 Festival 3, 209
community-level art 94 digital arts 3, 6, 205
ConFest 223 Dilkes-Frayne, E. 14
Connell John 50, 52, 180 Dimension 7 227
Consortium of Collective Consciousness Distrikt 230
(CCC) 226–7 DiYethics 138–9, 209, 226
Cormany, Diane L. 15 DJ Mag 83
cosmopolitanism 9, 177–80, 185, 190 DMT 121
Cova, Bernard, 12 DMZ (Dance Music Zone) 224,
crack 121 240–1
Creamfields 26, 50–1 Do It Yourself (DiY) 138–9, 148, 209,
Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 225–6
(1994) 53, 139 Doherty, Brian 224
cultural associations 111 donation principle 163–8, 171
cultural belonging 70, 77–8, 88, 108 Dosse, François 171
cultural capital 84–5, 101 Dowd, Tim 176, 179, 185
cultural consumption 175, 178–9, 185, DOxfamily 121
188. See also cosmopolitanism Draft Code of Practice for Dance
cultural economy 26, 139, 176 Parties 54
cultural engagements 86, 88 DrYes 238
cultural identity 72 drugs organizations 129
cultural legitimation 177–80 drugs workers 117, 128, 131–2
248 INDEX
Duffy, Conor 55 outdoor space 144–55

Duffy, Michelle 120 raves 160–3, 170–1
Envision 10
Echenhofer, Frank 121 EQing 211, 214
Eden Festival 140, 142, 149 Eshun, Kodwo 211
Electric Daisy Carnival (EDC) 3, 7, 71, event organizers 16
233, 236, 239
electronic dance music (or EDM) 1–2, Facebook 14, 35, 236, 238
5, 8, 16–17 Falassi, Alessandro 149
Asian American youth and 69–88 FCMM 198, 200
in Australia 45–63. See also festival market 7, 11, 37, 61–2
Stereosonic festival sponsorship 52
in Belgium 3, 26, 30, 50–1. See also festivalgoers 93, 111, 117, 119, 121,
Tomorrowland 140, 142, 149, 156
in Canada 3, 6, 17, 195–215. See festivalization 1–2, 5, 8, 18, 51, 190
also MUTEK Festival Republic 32
culture industry 4, 14, 16–17, 26, festivalscapes 2, 14
28–9, 32, 39 Fikentscher, Kai 59–60, 71, 211
in England 137–71 First Nations peoples 13
history 5–9 Fischer-Lichte, Erika 99
Insomniac Events 4, 9, 14, 69, 72–3, Fiske, John 27
77, 87 Fitzsimons, Scott 46, 48, 53
international events 175–7, 179, Florida, Richard 34
184–6, 188–90. See also Sonar fobby Asians 83
festival Fontaine, Astrid 161
Kosmicare (Portugal). 115, 118, Fontana, Caroline 161
124–6, 129–30 Franklin, Cabe 233
Kosmicare (UK) 116, 123, 126–7 frat bros 84–5
psychedelic crises 115–33 free festival culture 53
publications 197, 213, 232–3, 235 free party 6, 15, 138, 142, 144, 148,
subcultural capital 70, 80, 84–5, 95, 154, 159–64, 166–9, 171, 225
241 collective function 164–71
in UK 138–56, 159–71. See also participants 166–9
Britain; England virtue of giving 169–70
in US 3, 8, 10, 12–14, 17, 52, Friz, Anna 208, 212
219–41. See also Burning Man Fung, Richard 76
electroniculture 199, 207 Fusion Festival 8, 16
Emerald City 2000 230 Future Music Festival 47, 49–50, 53
Emerson, Amy, L. 123–4, 128
England Gadeken, Charles A. 224
alternative electronic festivities galleries 154, 175, 178, 203
160–3 Garnier, Laurent 160
collective expression 149–55 Garrett, Rod 220
democratic cultures 146–9 Gateway sound system 226
free party 138, 142, 144, 148, 154, Gauthier, Francois 220
159–64, 166–9, 171 gay and lesbian cultures 53
hedonism 137, 142, 144, 148–9, gay black clubs 70–1
151, 155 Gelman, Robert, B. 228
INDEX 249
gender 70, 74–5, 88, 107, 111, 195, Hemment, Drew.196

197, 200, 202, 207–10, 213 heroin 117, 121, 127, 129, 132
generosity 112, 168, 170 Herzog, Thomas R. 150
genres/genders 202 Hetherington, Kevin 119, 141, 144, 154
Getz, Donald 30, 34 Hewings, Meg209
Gibson, Chris 50–2, 54, 57, 61, 155, higher-income groups 86
180 Hill Collins, Patricia 74, 76
Gieseking, Jen Jack, 148, 155 Hill, Andrew 71
gift-exchange 7, 14, 159–60, 163–5, hip-hop blackness 70, 72, 81, 83, 85–7
167–71 Hitzler, Ronald 3, 34
parallel economy 167–8 Holt, Fabian 1, 3–5, 8, 17, 25–40
Gilbert, Jeremy 177 Homan, Shane 49, 54–6, 58
Gilmore, James H. 101 Homebake 52
Gilmore, Lee 120, 130, 223, 234 house music 25, 70, 160, 182
GiorgiLiana 27, 179, 191 House of Lotus 230
Glastonbury festival 35, 46, 58, 138, Hughes, Gordon 124
142, 179 Hughes,Caitlin E. 124
Go-Go dancers 83, 237 Hunt, Neil 128
Godbout, Jacques T. 159, 163–4, 168, Hutson, Scott R. 71, 74
171 hybridisation 139, 187, 203, 214
Good Vibrations 47, 50, 61 hyperliminal contexts 17
Gosney, Michael 226–7
Gration, David 52 ID&T 26, 35–7
gravitas 196, 207–9 Insomniac Events 4, 9, 14, 69, 72–3,
Green Gorilla Lounge 230 77, 87
Green, Penelope 112, 119, 137, 142, International Cities of Advanced Sound
149–50, 155, 230 (ICAS) network 199
Griffiths, Neil 63 international DJs 48, 51, 56
Groovin the Moo 50 international events 175–7, 179, 184–6,
Grynszpan, Emmanuel 161, 167, 170 188–90. See also Sonar festival
Hall, Staurt 27–8 Jacobs, Emma 139

Hanley, James 32 Jarvis, Nick 46
HARD Events 69 Johansson, Marjana 12, 15, 146, 149
Hardware Corp 48, 53–4 Jones, Ruby 49
harm reduction paradigm 117–18, Jones, Steven T 8, 119, 224
122–32
Harrison, Mark 154–5 Kahn, Peter H. Jr 151
Hart Graham 140 kandi ravers 84–5
Hartig, Terry 151 KCUK (UK) 116, 118, 123, 126–7,
Harvey, David 132 129
Harvey, Larry 220, 222, 231, 236, 240 Kellner, Douglas 38
Hasbach Patricia H. 151 Kelly-Gagnon, Michel 203
headliners 30–1, 39, 49, 57–8, 60–1, Kembrey, Melanie, 49
97, 232 Kibria, Nazli 75
hedonism 33, 51, 108, 112, 130–1, 137, Kjus, Yngvar 52
142, 144, 148–9, 151, 155, 181, Knight, Chris 240
189, 196, 205 Koinonea 227
250 INDEX
Kong, Lily 60 Maffesoli, Michel 160

Kosmicare (Portugal). 115, 118, 124–6, MagauddaPaolo 2–3, 5, 17, 34,
129–30 175–91
Kosmicare (UK) 116, 123, 126–7 MagikanaFestival 149–50
Kosmicki, Guillaume 162 Maira, Sunaina 71, 76
Kozinets, Robert V 12, 101, 119, 130 Mangold, William 148, 155
Krasnow, Stefanie Sara 119 Marin, Louis 119
Krueger,AlanB 30 Marke, Bieschke 233, 236
Kruse, Holly 178 Marlatt, Gordon Alan 127
kula 168 Martin, Greg 52
Martin, Stewart 100–1
Laclau, Ernesto 102 Martin, ValQrie 198
Lalioti, Vassiliki 52, 178 Mason, Kerri 31–2
Lamont, Michele 179 Massey, Doreen 141
Large-Scale Sound Art Zone (LSSAZ) Mauss, Marcel 159, 163, 166, 168–9
220 Mayer, Stephan F. 151
Latinos 73, 75, 83 McCabe, Kathy 49
Lawrence, Tim 2 McCall, Tara 74, 211
Le-Phat Ho, Sophie 207, 210 McKay, George 2, 33, 139, 141–2,
Lee, Jennifer 71, 75–6 144
Lee, Robert G. 75, 77 McLeod, Kembrew 62
Lee, Stacey J. 75 MDMA 116–17, 121
Leeds 142, 179 Measham, Fiona, 71
Lefebvre, Henri 199–200 mega-events 4–5, 51–2, 61, 223
Lemuria 230 Meier, Wendy Clupper 99
Leung, Jeet-Kei 11, 107–8, 110–11, Melechi, Antonio 204
119, 121, 129, 139 middle-class whiteness 70–2, 74, 81–2,
Liddle, Kathleen 176, 179, 185 84–8
Lightning in a Bottle 3, 10, 111, 139 Miller, Paul D. 209
Limbach, Elizabeth 96–7 mobile sound 219, 236–7
Liogier, Raphaël 167 Mog 219, 229, 236
Listen Out 50 Molnbr, Virag 179
Live Nation 52 Montano, Ed 2, 4–5, 17, 26, 45–63,
Live Nation Entertainment 4 178
London clubs 160 Moore, David 128
Lopes, Paul D. 177 Moran, Jonathon 62
Love Parade 3, 34 Morey, Yvette 15, 52
Low, Murray 146 Móró, Levente123, 131
lower-class blackness 72, 83, 86–7 Morrison, Toni 85
LSD 115–16, 121 Mouffe, Chantal 102
Lucidity 10 Multidisciplinary Association for
Luckman, Susan 52–5 Psychedelic Studies (MAPS)
Lundquist, Andrea 229 123–4
Lush 230 multiracial 72–3, 83
Lynskey, Dorian 13 mushrooms 121
music as gifts 169
Mac, Ryan 50 Musée d’Art Contemporain (MAC)
MACBA 186–8 201, 204–5
INDEX 251
Mutant Vehicles (MVs) 236, 238, Oak, Annie, 127, 131

241 O’Malley, P. 127–8
MUTEK 3, 6, 17. See also Canada O’Grady, Alice 15–17, 51–2, 137–56
audience 198–9, 201–2, 204, 206–9, Olaveson, Tim 196
213–14 Oleaque, Joan M 181
being-scene stage- work 197–203, Oliveras, Jordi 187
208–10 Olszanowski, Magdalena 210
communitas concept 195–9, 202–7, OneLove 46, 48, 50
214–15 Onsia, Martijn 128
cultural conditions 210–12 Opulent Temple 230
DJ performance 196–7, 201–2, Osborne, Thomas 121, 128, 130
205–6, 208–15 overcrowding 46
15th anniversary 195
funding policy 203–4 Pacholik, Devin 13
laptop performance 212–14 Packer, Jan 149
Media Lounge 197–200 Pagan, Rebecca 54
percussion on amplified fruit 212 Palmer Robert 33
rave culture 195–9, 202, 204–5, Papilloud, Christian 166
207–11, 213 Park, Judy 8–9, 17, 69–88
space shift 204–6 Parklife 47, 50, 61
spatial intimacy 200–3 parks 31, 33, 47, 57, 206, 225
technologies 195–215 Partridge, Christopher 141
women, participation 206–8 party-as-gift 164–5, 168–70
Pascal Querner 7
Naess, Arne 150 Pasquale, Rotella, 7, 69–70
Napieralski, Mikolai 46 Pearson, Ewan 177–178
Nasrallah, Dimitri 196 peer support 117, 122, 126, 128–9,
national identity 9 131–2
National Public Radio (NPR) 35 Peoples, Glenn 4
natural environment 150–2, 154 Perez, Ivan 183
NBOMe 121 perpetual foreigner 70, 72, 74–6, 78,
Nebel, Mary B. 151 87–8
Nelson,Jeena 176, 179, 185 Peterson, Richard, A 15, 28–9, 40, 42,
neoliberalism 12, 39, 111, 117, 121, 176, 178
128, 130–2, 140–1 Petiau, Anne 7, 17, 159–72
Newbold, Chris, 49, 52, 57 Phillips, Lawrence D. 128
non-profit groups 52 Pike, Sarah 120
nonwhite DJs 83 Pine II, Joseph B. 101
nonwhite groups 82–3, 86–7 Pink Mammoth 230
novel psychoactive substances (NPS) playa 219–20, 223–4, 226, 229–32,
121, 123, 132 234–41
novelty 15–16 PLUR (Peace, Love, Unity, Respect)
Nowicka, Magdalena 178 8–9, 69–72, 74, 77–8, 81–2,
Nozstockfestivals 140, 145–6, 152 84–5, 87
NSW Draft Code of Practice for Dance Pongsakornrungsilp, Siwarit 12
Parties 53–4 popular DJs 83
Nutt, David, 128 Portugal 3, 6, 9–10, 13–14, 17. See also
Nye, Sean 3, 34 Boom Festival; Kosmicare
252 INDEX
Pourtau, Lionel 162, 167, 169 remix aesthetics 56, 111, 195, 197, 209,
prestige 5, 17, 168–9, 231–2, 239 213–14
professionalization 55, 171 Reynolds, Simon 1, 8, 28, 71, 74, 155,
promotional practices 48, 57, 62, 175, 158
180, 231 Rhodes, Tim. 123, 128
psychedelic support 117–32. See also Richards, Greg 33, 62
transformational festival Rietveld, Hillegonda C. 2, 138
public perception 182, 185–6, 189–91 ‘RIPE,’ label 219
Purdue, Derrick 119 rituals 93, 98, 103, 106, 110, 112–13
Putnam, Robert 146–8 Ritzer, George 12
Roberts, Adrian 236
Queudrus, Sandy 167 Robinson, Roxy 14
Robot Heart 230–3
racialization 72–3, 75, 77–9, 81–4, Roche, Maurice 38
86–7, 103, 107, 111 Rock festivals 30–1, 39, 49–51, 59–60
Racine, Etienne 161 Rodgers, Tara 210
Radio-V 227 Rom, Tom 7
Raindance Campout (California, United Root Society 230
States) 93, 95–6, 106, 112 Rose, Nikolas 121, 128, 130
aesthetic compounds 93–7, 99–104, Rovisco, Maria 178
107–9, 112–13 Ruane, Deirdre 13, 17, 115–33
ancient future culture 109–11 Ruggieri, Melissa 34
DJs 93–4, 97–8 rural festivals 52, 140
ecological ethos 108–9 ‘ruta del bakalao’ 176
political implication 95–6, 100–4, ruta destroy 176–7, 180–4, 186, 188, 190
107–8, 110–13 Ryan, Bill 28
relational art 96–9
sculpture 95, 97, 104–6, 108 Sachs, Elliot 70
visionary art 110 Sackllah, David 32
Rancière, Jacques 102 Sacred Dance Society 227
Rapp, Tobias 6 Saenz, David 182
rave 46, 53–5 Saldanha, Arun 103, 110, 234
raver/traveller alliance 138 Santoro, Macro 177, 185, 191
raves 3, 5, 10, 70–1, 77, 82–3, 88 Sassatelli, Monica 8–9, 27, 179, 191
Rbcz, Jozsef 123, 131 Schmidt, Bryan 11, 13, 93–112
Reading 142, 179 Schmidt, Patricia 196–7, 199–200, 203
Real, Madrid 37–8 Schroeder, Jonathan E 12
reciprocity 146, 160, 164, 166, 171 Secret Garden Party 13–14, 116
reconfiguration of identity 176, 179–80, Seffrin, Georgia 94
184, 189–90 Seidlitz, Gene 240
Redhead, Steve, 180–1, 183 self-organisation 170–2
Regev, Motti 179 Service Intervention in Addictive
relational aesthetics 95–7, 99–103, Behaviors and Dependencies
107–8, 112–13. See also (SICAD) 123
Raindance Campout sexuality 70, 74, 88
relational art 96–7, 100–2, 104, 108, SFX Entertainment 3, 13, 15, 46,
112 48–50, 53, 62–3
INDEX 253
Shah, Neil 34 spontaneity 168

Shambhala 10, 139 Squires, Rosie 46
Shankar, Avi 12 St John, Graham 6–9, 14, 16–17, 25,
Shapiro, Peter 178 27, 33, 51–3, 56, 62, 69, 93, 99,
Sherburne, Philip 31, 202–3, 209 111, 115, 119–21, 130, 137–9,
Short, John Rennie 153 141, 144, 161, 178, 180–1, 191,
Sicko, Dan 209, 211 196, 207, 211, 219–41
Sikorski, David 232–4 stadiums 47
Silcott, Mireille 70 Stahl, Geoff 6, 26, 203
Sisario, Ben 4, 50 Stapell, Hamilton M. 181
Slater, Don 26 Stereosonic 4, 45–63
Soapbox Agency 48 artists 45, 48, 51–3, 56–9
social criticisms 176 club culture 51, 53, 58, 60
social groups 73, 170 DJs 45, 47–8, 51, 54, 56–62
social media 4, 8, 13–15, 26, 35, 37–9, EDM consumption 45–63
48, 69, 81, 142, 147, 232, 239 local and global performances 56–60
sociality 94, 112–13, 148, 234 music festivals 50–2
Society for Art and Technology (SAT) promotional practices 48, 57, 62
197, 200–4 Stevens, Alex 124, 128
socioeconomic status 86 Stimulants 121
Sol System 230 strategic ignorance 81–3, 87
Solaroli, Marco 191 Straw, Will 62, 154, 178, 199, 204
Sónarfestival 176–9, 184–6, 190 Strip Ship 237
art exhibitions 188 subcultural capital, EDM festival 70,
audience 176, 178, 181, 184–9 80, 84–5, 95, 241
cosmopolitanism 177–80, 185, 190 subvert products 171
cultural consumption 175, 178–9, Sullivan, Paul 205
185, 188 Summer Solstice festival 220
DJs 178, 183, 187–8 Sunburn 26–7
globalisation 175–6, 178–9, 185, Sunrise Celebration 10, 119, 142
189–90 S.U.N. Summer Gathering 14
music genres 178–9, 187 support groups 127, 133
reconfiguration of identity 176, Sydney Olympic Park 45
179–80, 184, 189–90 Symbiosis 10
sorority girls 85
sound-art car 219 Taylor, Jodie 1
Soundwave 49–50 techno genres 211
Space Cowboys 219–20, 224, 229–30, Techno.ca 210–11
236–8 teknivals 3, 6–7, 159–62, 165, 171
Spain. See also Sónar festival Temporary Autonomous Zone (TAZ)
ruta destroy 176–7, 180–4, 186, 139, 145, 156, 170
188, 190 Tennison, M. 128
spatial practice 2, 119, 138–9, 146–7, The Oracle Gatherings 10
155, 184, 186, 196, 201, 204, Thornton, Sarah 71, 80, 95, 176, 181,
220 183, 207, 213
SPAZ 225–6 Tomorrowland (Belgium) 3–4, 7, 26,
Spincom 233 31, 34, 36–8, 50–1
254 INDEX
Tonka sound system 227 upper-middle-class 78, 86–7

Toraldo Maria Laura 12, 15, 146, 149 urban lower class 83, 86
Totaro, Donato 198 urbanization 51, 54
Totem OneLove 4, 46, 48, 53, 62
tourism 1, 3, 5–6 Valverde, Mariana 128
Tramacchi, Des 120 vanVeen, tobias c. 6, 195–215
transformational festivals 3, 9–18, 96, Veal, Michael E. 210
103, 106–12. See also Burning V festival 142
Man (Nevada, US); Raindance Vibe Patrol (Boom) 122
Campout Vibes on a Summer’s Day 47, 49
collective image 119–22 Vincent, Peter 49
ideologies 117–18
proliferation 119 Waddell, Ray 30
use of drugs 117, 121–5, 128–32 waste management 171
utopian social aspirations 120 water sculpture 97, 104–5, 108
translocal model 5, 176–80, 185–7, Watson, Sophie 146–8
189–90, 199 Waveform festival 119, 140, 147
Tupper, Kenneth W. 128 We Love Sounds 47
Turco, Marina 200 Weber, Jutta 214
Turcotte, Andrew 203 Webster, Emma 30
Turino, Thomas 16 weekend cultures
Turner, Erik 10 cosmopolitanism 177–80
Turner, Victor 8, 10, 120, 196, 234 cultural dimension 177–80
turntablist performance 196, 208, reconfiguration 184–90. See also
210–14 Sónar festival
2000 Olympic Games 45 Werry, Margaret 103, 111
Two Tribes festival 48, 52–3 Westernized Asians 83
White Wonderland 72–3, 83
Ultra Music Festival 50–1 Wicked sound system 225–6
United States. See Burning Man Wilson, Peter Lamborn 222
(Nevada, US); Raindance Wilson, Brian 178
Campout (California, United Womack, Ytasha 211
States) Woodward, Ian 1, 190
UK. See also England; Kosmicare (UK) Worthington, Andy 138, 141
alternative festivals 138–54 Wynn, Jonathan R. 2
collective well-being 138–42, 144,
148–9, 152, 154–6, 162, Yahoo! 31, 35
164–71 Yeganegy, Roxanne 146
cultural economy 139 YouTube 8, 14, 31, 35, 37, 76
DJs 138, 142, 170 Yu, Henry 75–6
drug laws 129
free festivals 141–4 Zendo Project (United States) 116, 118,
rural festival 139–40 122–6
raves 160–3, 170–1 Zendo Roamers (Burning Man) 122
spatial concept 141 Žižek, Slavoj 109
Ulldemolins, JoaquimRius 185 Zhou, Min 71, 75–6
Ultra Music Festival 26, 50–1 Zukin, Sharon 34

Weekend Societies - Electronic Dance Music Festivals and Event-Cultures-Bloomsbury Academic (2017)

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Weekend Societies - Electronic Dance Music Festivals and Event-Cultures-Bloomsbury Academic (2017)

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Weekend

1385 Broadway 50 Bedford Square

First published 2017

© Graham St John, 2017

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted

No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-0931-1

Cover design by Louise Dugdale

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List of Figures vii

Introduction: Dance Music Festivals and Event-Cultures

PART ONE Dance Empires and EDM Culture

2 Stereosonic and Australian Commercial EDM Festival

3 Searching for a Cultural Home: Asian American Youth in

PART TWO Underground Networks and

5 Harm Reduction or Psychedelic Support? Caring for Drug-

6 Dancing Outdoors: DiY Ethics and Democratized Practices

7 Free Parties and Teknivals: Gift-Exchange and

PART THREE Cosmopolitan Experiments and

9 Being-Scene at MUTEK: Remixing Spaces of Gender

10 Charms War: Dance Camps and Sound Cars at Burning

1.2 Tomorrowland main stage 2013. 36

2.1 Stereosonic, Sydney 2012. 47

2.2 Stereosonic, Sydney 2012. 51

4.1 A painter creates visionary art near the dancefloor of a

4.2 Water sculpture with permaculture system created by

4.3 A piece of visionary art present at Raindance 2013. 110

5.1 The Sacred Fire, Boom 2014. 118

5.2 Constructing the Temple, Burning Man 2014. 120

5.3 The Zendo setup at Burning Man 2014. 125

6.1 Demonstration of blacksmithing at Alchemy Festival,

6.2 Demonstration of woodcarving with chainsaws at

6.3 Waveform Festival, 2012. 147

6.4 Magikana Festival, Wales. 150

8.1 Main stage at ‘Sónar by Day’ 2009, when the festival

9.1 Jeff Mills plays percussion on the Roland TR-909,

9.2 Katherine Kline and Erin Sexton improvise live

9.3 Mossa plays percussion on amplified fruit, MUTEK

10.1 The Ten Principles of Burning Man. 221

10.2 Techno Ghetto, Burning Man, 1996. 227

10.3 The Space Cowboys’ ‘Mog’, Burning Man 2014. 229

10.4 The Dancetronauts, Burning Man 2014. 238

Researchers across the spectrum of social and cultural disciplines have, in

these practices amenable to understanding – frameworks that will inevitably

Festivalscapes are a set of cultural, material and social flows, at both

Scholars have given considerable attention to the study of music festivals.

music, including festivals. While the international community of researchers

operations under variable missions – reclaiming tradition, maintaining

Dance event-cultures and festivalization

a now crowded calendar of psychedelic trance festivals in Europe and

cinematic experience. As a mediated effort to capture the immediacy of an

racial stereotyping within scenes that have typically promoted egalitarianism.

the alternative spectrum of events, are transformational. In fact, this is

an ecstatic core ritual provided through electronic dance music;

These are the paraphrased observations of Jeet-Kei Leung, a documentary

green and ethical lifestyle as part of leading a sustainable and responsible

Investigations of social media enabled prosumerism among festival goers

In electronic dance music scenes, music producers, event organizers and

EDM Pop: A Soft Shell

Upon a hill across a blue lake

mass culture and corporate industry formations beyond the conventional

Conceptual approach: Industry sociology

2.1 Stereosonic, Sydney 2012. 47

2.2 Stereosonic, Sydney 2012. 51

4.1 A painter creates visionary art near the dancefloor of a

4.2 Water sculpture with permaculture system created by

4.3 A piece of visionary art present at Raindance 2013. 110

5.1 The Sacred Fire, Boom 2014. 118

5.2 Constructing the Temple, Burning Man 2014. 120

5.3 The Zendo setup at Burning Man 2014. 125

6.1 Demonstration of blacksmithing at Alchemy Festival,

6.2 Demonstration of woodcarving with chainsaws at

6.3 Waveform Festival, 2012. 147

6.4 Magikana Festival, Wales. 150

8.1 Main stage at ‘Sónar by Day’ 2009, when the festival

9.1 Jeff Mills plays percussion on the Roland TR-909,

9.2 Katherine Kline and Erin Sexton improvise live

9.3 Mossa plays percussion on amplified fruit, MUTEK

10.1 The Ten Principles of Burning Man. 221

10.2 Techno Ghetto, Burning Man, 1996. 227

10.3 The Space Cowboys’ ‘Mog’, Burning Man 2014. 229

10.4 The Dancetronauts, Burning Man 2014. 238